Echo across the Web: A local newspaper on the Internet

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.