So it's quiet. Don't let the silence fool you. These days, a modern newspaper is a lot like a nuclear submarine. On the surface, all is quiet, but there's an awful lot going on below the waterline. A newspaper may have a larger mix of different kinds of computer systems than any other business, but a failure of just about any system today whether in circulation or advertising or editorial could seriously damage our ability to do business, so we have a lot of redundancy.
Computers help on both ends.
Let's take specific departments in the order offered up by Dwyer circulation, advertising and editorial. Subscribers are entered into a data base. Four weeks before your account runs out of money, the computer system produces a reminder and generates a bill which is mailed to the subscriber. It goes straight to the bank and they transfer it to us via modem. With things like direct deposit of employee paychecks, we also pay a lot of our bills electronically.