As the millennium turns and TechNews celebrates its fifth birthday (see pp. 20-21), our business is changing. By "our business," I don’t mean the collective "our business" of producing and delivering newspapers, but rather TechNews’ specific business of covering that activity.

Our business is changing for the same reasons yours is–the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The ink-on-paper TechNews circulates bimonthly to about 11,000 elite operations executives at NAA-member newspapers. Last August, TechNews Online received more than four times that number of page impressions. TechNews Online is routinely the most visited content area on NAA’s Web site (www.naa.org).

To be honest, we’re not really sure how to interpret these numbers. How do 45,000 page impressions in one month relate to 11,000 bimonthly subscribers? How many individuals visit our Web site during our bimonthly publishing cycle? And who exactly are these people–our intended audience of NAA members or others who happen to be interested in newspaper technology?

We have our hunches. Because we don’t promote the Web site and because every story we’ve ever published is in our online archives, we believe a lot of people are coming to our site via search engines such as Yahoo! and AltaVista. (Try typing "shaftless press" or "microzoning" into AltaVista, and the first result probably will be a TechNews story.) Judging by our e-mail, our audience seems to be an eclectic worldwide mix of newspaper operations people, vendors and assorted others, only some of whom are NAA members.

But one thing is crystal clear: TNO is becoming an increasingly important part of our business.

Accordingly, we are devoting increased attention to our Web site. You can now search our archives either by key word or by Yahoo!-style drilling into subject areas. We have improved our links to both NAA and non-NAA Web sites. Soon, we hope to put up bulletin boards divided by operational areas, so you can converse with your counterparts at other newspapers worldwide.

Also, for the first time ever, we will be providing Web-only, gavel-to-gavel coverage of NAA’s Newspaper Operations SuperConference, Jan. 23-28 in Miami Beach. If you’d like to receive e-mail messages summarizing each day’s events and pointing you to further coverage on TNO, you can sign up at www.naa.org/technews or send an e-mail to technews@naa.org.

In this millennium, as in the last, we are dedicated to providing the industry’s best coverage of newspaper operations and technology, presented in the most innovative and easily accessible formats possible.

Clark Robinson
TechNews Editor

TechNews Volume 6, Number 1: January/February 2000

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