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On Wed, 29 Mar 1995, William P Densmore Jr. wrote:

> 
> Let me start a new thread. My purpose is to invite thoughtful comment 
> about the state of web publishing and the objectives of those newspapers 
> who are using it or are thinking about doing so. As such, the replies I 
> hope to instigate are not "ABCDE" answers. I'm curious what others see as 
> the relationship of the web to the printing press now and in a few years.
> 
> The average publisher views WWW publishing today as:
> 
> A	-- A worthless gadget
> B	-- A neat experiment
> C	-- A marketing expense
> D	-- A block against emergence of new competitor
> E	-- The main transport mechanism for future news content

I have worked for two publishers (Dow Jones & McGraw Hill).  Both
consider it to be a Major transport mechanism.  The advantages include 
real-time delivery, user controlled layout and presentation, multimedia 
capabilities, and huge potential circulations at very low cost.

> How about in a year? In two years? In five years?

The real question is not whether, but what to migrate when.

The business section is moving quickly.  With few advantages to long term 
capital gains, the investment community is playing for the short term, 
moving from one area to the next.  To spot the next trend 15 minutes 
before the rest of the industry can yield 300-500% more than even Daily 
trends.  Everyone remembers the Crash of 1987, few people remember that 
the story that triggered it was the announcement that the U.S.A. had 
torpedoed Iranian Oil Platforms, threatening another energy crisis.

Those who heard about the Japan Quake and bought lumber futures made
out like bandits.  If they switched to yen (knowing that the Japanese 
would need to repatriate their Yen to pay for the quake), they did well.

If they saw the announcement that Unix was outselling MS-Windows and bought
shares of Sun, HP, and Apple, they wouldn't have been suprised to see 
that revenues had doubled, they would have been disappointed that they 
hadn't tripled.  Those who sold short on Novell when they heard in 1993 
that TCP/IP was growing at 20%/month (a full year before it made the 
papers) also did very well.

The stock brokers were happy to pay $300/month/user + $1.50/kbyte 
downloaded.  The casual investor was happy to pay $40/month.  Business 
managers wanting to stay informed about their competition paid $30/month.
Technical managers and engineers paid $50/year.  About the same price as 
the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Byte Magazine respectively.

The paper media doesn't have the resources to cover microeconomies which 
can be predictably volitile, and therefore profitible.  The user may want 
something on paper to read on the train, or in the bathroom, but that's 
what printers are for.

> | Bill Densmore -- President                     NEWSHARE CORPORATION |

	Rex Ballard
	Project Manager - Electronic Distribution
	S&P Financial Services.


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Apr  5 21:22:15 1995
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