Time's site became an important historical record, with layers of content that the printed magazine couldn't accommodate. But the site is famous for such use of layered publishing on many stories. The top of the page offers an index of sections, from Asia Report to Talent Scout, and services, from the Mercury Mall to the Yellow Pages. The site also offers Good Morning Silicon Valley, special online coverage of the high-tech industry. Another feature is the digital News Library, where readers can call up more than a million articles, including all stories in the Merc published since 1985 plus the archives of nineteen other Knight-Ridder papers.
Readers can run free searches that return a list of headlines and the first graf of every story.
Beyond that, only subscribers can get full stories, paying a minimum of twenty-five cents apiece. As an example of how journalists can employ the near limitless space of the Web to add depth and context, consider how the Chicago Tribune used its website to memorialize Mike Royko after he died April 29. The interactive tribute includes fourteen news stories about Royko, an electronic message board where some 700 readers had posted messages by the end of May, and an archive of dozens of Royko's best columns. Tribune Company is a partner in an interactive feature called Digital City, which offers entertainment, lifestyle, and community information at the local websites of newspapers in its chain, such as The Orlando Sentinel. The News Watcher continuously feeds customized local, regional, national, and international news to your computer screen, where it retreats to a small window when you are using another application.