Echo across the Web: A local newspaper on the Internet
| Published date | 01 April 1996 |
| Pages | 357-363 |
| Date | 01 April 1996 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045491 |
| Author | G. Sargent |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
Echo across the
Web:
a
local
newspaper
on
the Internet
G. Sargent
Department of information and Library
Studies,
Loughborough
University,
Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK
E-mail:
g.f.sargent@lboro.ac.uk
Abstract:
The
Internet,
and in particular the World
Wide
Web,
is
growing at a
remarkable
rate.
It is already a significant channel for information distribution
and looks set to become a universal medium.
A demonstration of how a local newspaper might use this medium was developed
for inclusion in a
seminar,
taking advantage of the fact that most local
newspapers already use electronic means of text and graphic manipulation in
their production. This paper describes the process from the point at which articles
and graphics were supplied electronically by the UK's Loughborough Echo
through to their inclusion in Web pages, and their eventual display via a Web
browser to readers on the
Internet.
It looks critically at how this process might be
embedded
in
the normal production of a local newspaper and discusses the likely
content,
readership,
publishers' motivation and the future of such a process.
1.
Introduction
The Internet has grown rapidly as a
means of communication and the ad-
vent of the World Wide Web, the hy-
pertext development of the Internet,
has done much to spur this growth.
While estimations of its size vary, Cerf
suggests that the Internet may have
five million computers permanently
connected, and an equal number inter-
mittently online (Cerf 1995).
Rutkowski says that in 1994 total net-
works increased by 97% in the USA,
and by
98%
elsewhere, making access
available in 90 different countries
(Rutkowski 1995).
A number of
local
authorities have
been providing community informa-
tion in electronic form for some time
(Baker 1992, Doulton et al. 1994).
This has traditionally been supplied
through videotex terminals, often lo-
cated in public buildings such as li-
braries. Many have now created Web
pages.
Non local authority-based com-
munity information has traditionally
been supplied by the local
press,
and so
it would seem likely that the local
press would also look to the World
Wide Web as a means of distribution.
Colonisation of the Web by busi-
nesses of
all
kinds has been a marked
recent feature. Included here are a
number of newspapers producing
what are generally thought of as 'on-
line editions'. In the UK, these news-
papers are mostly national titles
(Beckett 1994; Diamond 1995), but
there are two local papers currently
listed on
NewsLink1
: the South Bucks
Star and the East Cambridgeshire
Online3. These two local papers are
very different in their online approach.
The South Bucks Star carries very little
that
is
specific
to the
Internet,
while
the
East Cambridgeshire Online seems
more aware of its network status.
The project reported here was de-
signed to demonstrate how a local
newspaper might look if delivered on
the Internet, and to establish the proce-
dures that might be necessary to main-
tain such a system. The demonstration
model was to be made available to at-
tendees of the seminar on Electronic
Public Information Provision (EPIP
'95),
held at Loughborough Univer-
sity on 19 September
1995,
and also to
the Internet at large, for one week
around the date of the seminar.
2.
Pilot edition
It had always been understood that for
the project to be successful, the direct
involvement of a local newspaper
would be essential, but as a first step
— and to provide a working model
that local newspaper staff could
see
—
a tentative 'pilot edition' was prepared
by scanning
in
the
logo
and certain
pic-
tures taken from an existing printed
edition of the Loughborough
Echo.
An
attempt was also made to scan the text
of the stories but
the
quality of the print
was not sufficiently high to allow Om-
niPage, the optical character recogni-
tion package (OCR) supplied with the
available scanner, to resolve the text,
and so the text of
a
few example stories
was rekeyed.
A number of advertisements placed
by local estate agents were also repro-
duced, together with part of the classi-
fied columns.
The structure of this pilot edition
consisted of a shallow hierarchy, with
a menu or 'headline page' containing
the
paper's scanned
logo at
the
top,
and
a list of headlines beneath. These were
linked directly to separate pages con-
taining the stories. The housing and
classified advertisements were listed
in a similar way to the headlines.
The separate story files were en-
coded so that text wrapped round the
picture, if one were present, and the
picture was set to the right of the
screen. This gave the story a slightly
The Electronic Library,
Vol.
14,
No.
4,
August 1996 357
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