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All the news in bits, not print A clean fight

All the news in bits, not print

Tuesday
February 25, 1997
News

Trade paper offers global news menu

Want to know what's new in Peru? The buzz from Bahrain? Or maybe you just want to check the classifieds or read the high-school sports scores from your Hoosier hometown. Have we got a Web site for you!

It's the Editor and Publisher Online Newspapers index, a searchable, browsable listing with more than 1,600 entries. Each entry goes first to a data form with details about the paper, frequency of publication, fees if any, advertising and archive policies, and suchlike. But click on the link and you can get the latest from Bar Harbor to Honolulu. International surfing may offer some surprises. You won't get much out of the Dagbladid Visir unless you're cool with Icelandic, but Liechtensteiner Vaterland, for instance, publishes an English-language edition.

All this is the work of Editor & Publisher, the authoritative weekly trade magazine for the newspaper industry. With roots stretching back to 1884, when "new technologies" meant linotype, E&P has moved aggressively into the electronic marketplace with its own online edition, E&P Interactive. Editorial director Hoag Levins says the publication realizes "the interactive end is really going to affect the newspaper business with major, major changes."

E&P Interactive's news page borrows some content from the print magazine's coverage of print newspapers, but also includes plenty of fresh material about Web papers. Levins is proud of that original content: "It's rare for an operation to have material that appears first on the Web and then later in print."

E&P sponsored the Interactive Newspapers '97 conference in Houston this month. Levins says more than a thousand people from 23 countries attended. Newspapers are in a "frenzy," he says, gearing up to compete with gigabuck entries like Microsoft's Sidewalk city guides.

The Houston confab included the World's Best Online Newspaper Service Awards. Top honors went to the New York Times (best large circulation), Charlotte (Fla.) Herald Sun (best smaller circulation), Chronicle of Higher Education (best weekly), and CNET's News.com (best from a non-newspaper company).

If you tire of such heady fare, don't forget the Bingo Bugle.

-- Randy Alfred

Image credit: © 1997 The Editor & Publisher Co.

All the news in bits, not print A clean fight


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