Tuesday, August 07, 2018

20 Years Ago on AOL.com: August 7, 1998 -- US Embassies in Africa Bombed

[In the late 1990s, I programmed the content for the AOL.com home page, which relaunched with a new design on July 14, 1998. I printed screencaps and saved them. 20 years later, I'm scanning them in and posting them with a little commentary.]

August 7, 1998: The US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania happened on a Friday, and while we added it to the top text spot, it wasn't enough to knock the Nicholas Cage movie Snake Eyes out of the graphic spot.

1998_08_07

20 years later, no one is talking about Snake Eyes.

It wasn't because we had payola deal where we had to promo it. (August 7 was just not a strong movie weekend.) Nor did we have a huge stake in the outcome of the movie. (Good thing, too.)

The main reason we didn't bump it from the graphic spot was timing and attention: We got the news late enough on a Friday it would have been a big hassle to request and get a news photo for a distant—though tragic—story, especially since people didn't really come to the site for news.

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