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C00002 00002		The electronic newspaper will differ from the conventional newspaper in
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	The electronic newspaper will differ from the conventional newspaper in
many aspects besides the medium itself.  Namely, there will be essentially no
space limitation since storage is cheap, standing information can be integrated
with changing information,and all "letters to the editor" can be accepted and
made accessible from the articles on which they comment. These and other features
will be experimented with.\.

	We see the eventual conversion of newspapers to electronic form
as a potential solution to problems of information monopoly.
First, the cost of entry to the newspaper business will be reduced since
the newspaper will not require a production or distribution organization
and will be able to live in publicly available time-sharing systems.
Second, if there is no production imposed limit to the size of the
newspaper, it will be easier for a newspaper to cater to the interests
of special groups.  Third, since all "letters to the editor" are automatically
and instantly accepted,
individuals or groups considering themselves unfairly treated
in stories will be able to make their replies available within minutes
of noticing the alleged unfairness.  Since this will be before most
readers have read the individual story, and since a reader will be able
to ask "and what does the Governor have to say about that" immediately
after reading the story, the danger of hit-and-run journalism will be
almost entirely eliminated.  We will experiment with this
facility locally at Stanford, but the experiment will become realistic
only when there are enough terminals so that the subjects of news stories
find it worthwhile to keep track of what is said about them and reply.

	In the above respects, \F1The Stanford Electronic Times\F0 differs
decisively from other experiments with new ways of providing information
to the home.  In these systems, the user
is passive in two respects.  First, his capacity to select information is
limited, and second, he doesn't have an effective low-overhead right to
reply or originate information.