Subject: Re: Re The Newsroom of the Future c. 2000 From: dowjone!rexb (Rex Ballard) Date: Mon, 14 Mar 94 01:35:29 EST

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> Subject: Re: Re The Newsroom of the Future c. 2000
> > On Mon, 7 Mar 1994, Steve Outing wrote:
> > > Also, isn't the idea of Mosaic to make the net's terabytes of
> > > information readily accessible to everyman/woman?
> Then Teresa Leonard wrote:
> > Those terabytes don't spring into Mosaic already organized. We're seeing
> > great potential for Mosaic and Lynx to provide information access to our
> > newsroom, but doesn't somebody have to make those links? The expanded
> > role for researchers is to point from those documents to earlier news
> > stories, externally collected material, databases, resources elsewhere on
> > the net.
> Teresa is right, of course. The "net effect" (sorry) of developing this new
> medium is that it will take more resources, not fewer. Until there are 
> reasonably universal search standards and intelligent agents to do the 
> work, humans will make the connections. Then the issue for newspapers will
> become: how much time do you spend providing links, and how broad do
> you make them? This won't be a trivial question because it is tied to the
> completeness of the report offered to readers.
One of the services of Dow Jones newswires is that the editorial department
adds catagory codes or metacodes to each article.  Even with intelligent agents
and sophisticated search algorythms, it takes 30 to 90 seconds per story to
confirm and edit these relatively simple codes.

> You will still need reporters to gather news, editors to edit and fact-check.
> And you will need more electronic personnel to deal with ever increasing 
> technical issues. And you will need more librarians/researchers to tie the
> electronic versions together.

You also have the issues of on-line vs real-time distribution.  Publishing
1 kbytes/second to 1,000,000 subscribers requires some sophisticated relay
techniques.  Supporting on-line search requests for 1meg subscribers requires
the ability to perform over 1000 transactions/second on indexes of over 1 million
records.  That will cover a nice 30 day database.

> You see, this is *another* medium, meaning additional. The cost of competing
> is about to go up. Newsprint will continue to be cranked out for the 
> foreseeable future.

Most people don't realize it, but NewsPrint is actually an abstract of the
actual news.  Editors try to sort stories based on what they believe will interest
most of their readers.  The Wall Street journal gives lots of space to megers
and new product announcements.  The don't give much to violent crimes, crimes
against people, and natural disasters.

The New York Times on the other hand, puts a much higher percent of it's content
on social issues, and less attention on "Strictly Business".  If the content
of all Dow Jones news wires was printed as a daily, it would be twice as big as
the Sunday Times.

> some people will migrate to the electronic version, but
> for now, it will most likely be the guys in the family.

It may be more accurate to say the workers in the family.  Women dominate
marketing, insurance, and public relations departments.  These are the
markets which are most likely to need on-line news.

>The women will
> choose (or at least have chosen in huge numbers so far) the paper.

Actually, this seems to be changing rapidly, especially in AOL and Delphi.
There seem to be many women on certain groups, especially personals, and
the equivalent of "soc" and "alt" groups.  Cyberspace is a safe way to find
out about someone without being judged first by appearances.

There are also growing segments in the business, service, and cultural
groups.  The "propeller heads" are becoming a minority on the news groups.

> Steve Snow
> shsnow@rock.concert.net



From jvncnet!marketplace.com!owner-online-news Mon Mar 14 10:38:55 1994