Nando - Toward The End

Toward The End

After the sale, McClatchy abandoned Nando's dial-up ISP business (sold to MindSpring, now part of EarthLink) and cut back its exploration of original news coverage, which had included the 1996 election campaign . McClatchy shifted the focus of "Nando New Media" to serve its newspapers and other clients, while Frank Daniels III and other early Nando executives left to create Internet startups focused on community news (Koz) and sports (Total Sports).

With Nando's changing role, The News & Observer established an interactive media division in 1997, led by Mark Choate. The new division produced newsobserver.com, an online newspaper publishing local news and advertising, as a complement to the national and international news published by Nando. Under Choate's direction, newsobserver.com quickly became one of the leading local newspaper web sites in the country. By 2001, The Media Audit ranked newsobserver.com third in the nation in terms of local market penetration for online newspapers, trailing washingtonpost.com and austin360.com. In that same year, Editor & Publisher awarded newsobserver.com with an EPpy, naming it the best online newspaper service in its circulation category.

The Nando Times pages were discontinued May 27, 2003, replaced with a "Dear readers" page of explanation, with a directory of McClatchy papers' individual sites where the former Nando Times content could be found. The editorial staff continued to process wire stories, which fed the "24 hour news" sections of other McClatchy properties, such as NewsObserver and SacBee .

The Nando brand was abandoned by the McClatchy Company on March 3, 2005 in favor of the name McClatchy Interactive.