Once derided as "shovelware," newpaper stories posted online leverage a paper's key aset and extends its traditional one-to-many relationship. Now many papers include a wide range of additional content, intended to compete with the city guides and portals of the Internet world.

Along with making content more searchable, XML simplifies the process of repurposing content across multiple plastforms and linking additional media such as images, audio and video. The News Industry Text Format, based on XML, enables aggregation and interchange among publishers and between platforms, and will simplify searchability and development of custom content.

The Portal Play

Whether called portals or city guides, broader newspaper sites merge content, community, classifieds and commerce, frequently acting as an intermediary aggregating community groups — and even media competitors.

XML enables the separation of presentation from content, placing platform-specific information in "style sheets" or templates. Doing so lets a single story and related multimedia stories be repurposed scross many platforms.