The year 2005 was a time of great change in Collingwood’s online world. President Eddie McGuire signalled as much in the March 2005 edition of the In Black and White magazine.

“Our Internet site will be a major focus this year as communication on-line with our members and supporters becomes increasingly important. Our website, www.collingwoodfc.com.au, will be re-launched at the start of the season and I urge all supporters to enjoy and make use of the site, and to join our email database.”

Change was afoot, and the man at the forefront was Clinton Bown.

Clinton oversaw the reconstruction of the website, taking it from just-another-football-website that was light on for Collingwood-specific news to a supporter’s first port of call for anything and everything Black and White.

This is Clinton’s tale of life with collingwoodfc.com.au.

When I arrived at Collingwood in 2005, we had a vision of building Australia’s first Club based multimedia channel – Collingwood TV. It was a blank canvas – no one had done it before.

It was a fantastic journey, with great support from Amber Crimmins (editor extraordinaire) and players Shane Wakelin and Paul Licuria – who hosted the first AFL club player driven content podcast.

These days you can stream content straight from your mobile phone, but back then we were pioneering live streaming of press conferences, and competing with the Herald Sun to report Collingwood news first.

I remember it was a real mind shift internally at the club: to be seen as a credible news source, and to be given the inside scoop over other news agencies, without crossing the line, that we were in fact employees of the Club.

When we went to Arizona for the first time, I took a video camera kit and laptop to edit. I would walk, run and climb all day, then eat dinner and start editing, so that when Australia woke up, they could watch a high quality video news service of the previous days training at altitude.

I would rarely get to sleep before 2am and wake up again at 6am.

I really felt over those 10 days, I helped build a foundation for years to come, of how hard the CTV crew are willing to work, to build a trust with the footy department and the players, and to most importantly ensure our supporters had the inside view of a Black and White World.

Our fans podcast “Pie Night” hosted by Con Frantzeskos was a great highlight, as was giving a start to so many great multimedia students who are now speckled around the industry doing so many great things.