To: Roberto Quezada 
cc: MDonatello@aol.com, harperc@is.nyu.edu, online-news@planetarynews.com,
        online-newspapers@planetarynews.com
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	AR is too much like a 
> newspaper without the comforts of holding one in my hands and being able 
> to move over the couch or breakfast table when I feel like it.
> 
> Roberto Quezada
> 

	We hear that quite a bit, Roberto, but very rarely from our
subscribers.  I believe that is because we are so much content-driven. 
Our feeling is that the simpler, the better.  The fewer distractions, the
better.  Also, our $5-a-year Web page is awkward and yet it offers an
awful lot to read (and for our clients who republish, an awful lot to
think about buying).  Our e-mail edition, which is usually about 60K
bytes, is a quite a bit faster read.  There is yet another important
consideration, which is that our Correspondents recieve very little in the
form of compensation for their high quality work; scrolling means that
each of them has a stronger chance of being read, wherever they may be in
the paper.  Another benefit of the text-only organization is that it loads
almost instantly, while graphics take forever. Finally, in order to put
out a publication for the highly literate, older audience we serve, we
need a lot of efficiencies; one of those is a strong de-emphasis on
graphic elements that are tedious to maintain and time-consuming to
create.  I believe the future of paid circulation publications on the Net
will lie not on the Web, but in publications like ours that serve a
limited number of heavy readers who have come to appreciate the
personality of the paper.  It's hard to build a personality or any real
links to your readers without exposing some of who you are as writers and
reporters and editors;  yet, publications that deliver a set of
hyperlinked news stories to subscribers -- or sometimes just the links and
a graf or less about the story -- cannot create it.  When one of our Cor-
respondents was wounded by a PLO terrorist last week, our readers 
responded because they know who he is; similarly, they write about their 
concern for our Indonesian Correspondent.  We value that kind of 
relationship a great deal.


Best,

Joe Shea
Editor-in-Chief
The American Reporter
joeshea@netcom.com
http://www.newshare.com:9999

From owner-online-news-digest@marketplace.com Fri Sep  6 21:28:18 1996
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