Anime Jump, 1998
Anime Jump was founded in June of 1998 by webmaster and editor Mike Toole. The site began its run as a semi-regular "webzine," with new content meant to be added at regular intervals. Not surprisingly, these intervals were regularly missed. The whole thing was modeled after the late, great EX. The early days of the site were amusing; Mike regularly cold-called publishers asking for press information and screeners, with many of them still reacting with confusion to the whole internet thing. He'd also spend long hours just reading the tail of the logfiles, watching visitors trickle in in real-time. Anime Jump initially brought in about 200 visitors per day.
The site went through its first major format change in 1999, when Mike figured out that people didn't want to wait weeks or months for new stuff; they'd be more likely to come back regularly if there was new content posted whenever it was ready. Anime Jump 2.0 looked a little different, but was still the same straight HTML animal that the original incarnation of the site was.
This format endured, with minor changes, for the better part of a year. When the next site change finally did take place, it was a momentous one. After a lengthy absence to "work out bugs" in 2000, (translation: slack off), the site was relaunched. Mike stopped generating individual HTML pages for this version, relying instead on Pete Stein's excellent GoScript CGI program to generate pages on the fly using templates and static HTML. In the meantime, he added a popular Big O microsite (which has sadly bitten the dust) and a user forum, which remains active and well-populated despite the occasional infuriating forum reset. By this time, the site was solidly popular, drawing thousands of views per day.
This version remained, with strictly cosmetic changes, until late 2002/early 2003. During this period, Mike finally started adding new writers; he brought on Christian Nutt to help with reviews in the summer of 2001, bringing Dave Merrill's D-Meter column over during roughly the same time period. Dave eventually took up writing reviews with the rest of the crew. As time progressed, Darius Washington, Mike Horne, Jason Carter, Chad Clayton, and Brian Hanson have all added their voices to Anime Jump. Prairie Rose Clayton has also kept a hand in things for much of Anime Jump's existence, principally as a forum moderator and copy editor.
That's the history of Anime Jump in a nutshell. As of this writing the site has endured for six and a half years, and we're nowhere near ready to throw in the towel. The site's current incarnation, driven by PostNuke (content management systems like this become a necessity when your site starts to have thousands of separate HTML pages), is a little unwieldy to administrate, but quite robust. Thanks for taking the opportunity to catch up on the history of this here site; now go and read some reviews!