High Beams Keep Drivers On the Road

Lawrence, Kansas is a liberal town, with a leg up on the internet enabled home news experience. The publishers of the local paper there were clever, they own the company that puts in the cable tv and high speed internet wires. So they have an 80% cable coverage, and have mixed up a huge combined newsroom where web, print, and TV use the same newspeople to report all at once. The publisher Dolph C. Simons Jr, 75, is a crusty old coot who still types with a Royal Manual typewriter, and eschews email.

But at the end of a long NY Times piece, he waxed futuristically poetic about why the newspaper people have and must offer the same or better on the web.

'We have to drive with our brights on,' he said. 'we can't be out there with our fog lights, or someone will drive us right off the road.'