🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello,

I would appreciate any info I can get regarding the state of the art in
electronic news (as in newspaper) publication. Any references to books
or a more appropriate newsgroup are also welcome. Some specific
questions I have are:

1) What types of news service are provided by Compuserve and other
online services? Where do they get their news and how do they translate
it into electronic format? How much do they charge for this?

2) How do Compuserve et al. handle the enormous number of simultaneous
logins that they must have? What kind of hardware/software do they run.
Is information stored in databases or is it just sitting around on a
disk in some natural format (like ascii)?

3) Is there a reasonable (practical) way to include pictures and
associate them with specific news articles?

4) Could it be financially feasable to provide local news (cheaper than
a newspaper) to a dial-up audience, given the fact that newspaper
advertising (and the associated income) would be difficult to duplicate?
Does anyone know of a successful implementation of something like this?

Thanks for any information.

-Tim Gallivan
timg@landau.ph.utexas.edu