George Schlukbier is the North American innovator who in the 1990s built Nando, one of the early websites offered by a daily newspaper, and NandO Times, an early and much-copied online newspaper. He later built Total Sports as an early online sports information source.
NandO
In 1993, The News & Observer hired Schlukbier as director of its newly formed New Media division. Editor Frank Daniels III set Schlukbier to work creating an on-line presence for the N&O. Schulkbier assembled a technical and editorial staff to carry out his ideas for an interactive service that would appeal to young people—a crucial and shrinking readership for U.S. newspapers. His first step was to purchase an existing internet access provider. Then he joined with the N&ONewspapers in Education program to make NandO IAP access free to all North Carolina schools. Once familiar with the internet and with NandO's offerings, students wanted access to its chatrooms and games at home. Schlukbier, the vice-president of NandO, worked with Daniels, Seth Effron, and Eric Harris in developing Nando Times as an interactive online newspaper offering a full menu of news, sports, and features from local to international. It became forerunner of the hundreds of such newspaper sites that popped up over the following decade.
Total Sports
purchased the News & Observer and its chain of smaller publications in 1995. Frank Daniels III left the newspaper, which had been owned and run by generations of his family, in favor of online ventures such as KOZ community news. He took Schlukbier with him. Daniels merged KOZ with Total Sports Publishing of Kingston, New York, known for its Total Baseball encyclopedia. The publishing arm, under founder John Thorn, continued to produce highly regarded sports books, including Total Hockey. Schlukbier became president and chief operating officer of Total Sports, charged with building a multifaceted online sports news information service. Assembling a staff made up, in large part, of the same people who had helped create NandO, Schlukbier accomplished this. The company offered subscribers instant access to scores, statistics and standings. Total Sports' landed a contract with the collegiate Atlantic Coast Conference to provide live online coverage of ACC games, a novelty at the time. A falling out with Daniels and the board of directors led to Schlukbier's resignation from Total Sports in May 2000. The company was sold later that year to Quokka Sports, Inc., of San Francisco.
Settling north of Toronto, Ontario in the 1970s, Schlukbier founded Info Bank, a company that was ahead of its time in anticipating the information age. Although the time and technology for Info Bank had not arrived, the experience he gained pointed to his later work with internet companies. He also worked as a newspaper librarian in Toronto. As a public librarian in the Borough of York, Schlukbier helped bring the library into the new age of digital catalogues and computer access.
Return to California
Schlukbier returned to California in the 1980s when Gregory Favre, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee, hired him to update its news "morgue," or newspaper library. From Sacramento, Schlukbier began reaching out to the Bee's sister newspapers in communities including Fresno, California, Anchorage, Alaska, and Kennewick, Washington. For the Bee's parent company, McClatchy he became point man in coordinating new technology for information storage and retrieval. This work brought him to Daniels' attention.
From 2011 to 2013 Schlukbier served as editor-in-chief of Best Thinking, a general-interest website, and Thinker Books, its affiliated e-book publishing enterprise. He left that position to concentrate on the print-publishing company Black Kettle Books, which he co-founded and which he operates as managing partner, and on a reconstituted Total Sports, which is now a developer of sports information apps for smart phones and tablet devices. .
