The Web, as I saw it, held out yet other possibilities for local papers such as the _N & O_. Suppose you lived in Chapel Hill and wanted to see what news had happened there in the past 24 hours; you could click on a map of the Raleigh area and behold a story list from your town. Neighborhood-level submaps could show still more. You could read the most minor tidbits—for example, new requests for zoning changes or items from neighborhood newsletters. Even more helpful, you could find old stories and other background information. Let’s say you were shopping for a condo on a certain street. You might think the neighborhood was safe—Chapel Hill is a university town, remember—but learn that many crimes had occurred nearby. Furthermore, you could adjust the _kind_ of information that you summoned from the Web. For example, you could see lists of houses for sale in a neighborhood and then retrieve their photos along with audio sales presentations. Moving on to another information category, you could uncover lists of nearby stores or see test scores from the closest elementary school. And you might even see ads from nearby restaurants and click on them to order. The food-related examples weren’t entirely hypothetical; Zonker Harris pointed me toward me some mock ads from Hardee’s and a chain called Little Caesar’s Pizza. The same business principles I discussed in chapter 2 applied here. Rather than planning to inflict vast quantities of material on the unwilling, the _N & O_ made the ads useful and entertaining. Elsewhere in the _N & O_ area I saw an ad for a computer dealer, among others, but the real triumph was the area from Mammoth Records—with home pages for bands, promo photos, discographies, tour dates, album covers, and more, including a catalogue and, yes, free samples. But what about the economics of all this? Via an electronic edition the _N & O_ wouldn’t collect the fifty cents it charged per hard copy issue, but it wouldn’t have to buy newsprint and distribution services. _That_ was how George Schlukbier hoped the newspaper would turn a profit eventually. The electronic activities, although not yet profitable as a whole, were coming along. People on the Net, for example, were calling up the pages within the _N & O_’s area several hundred thousand times a week. A page was what you saw when you clicked the mouse to call up an item, and each page could be just a few lines of information, or go on for a number of screens. Zonker Harris expected that by the end of 1994 as many people would be dialing up the _N & O_ as called up SunSite UNC, the popular collection of files at the University of North Carolina. Readers retrieved Mammoth Record’s pages some 35,000 times a week. That didn’t mean 35,000 people—there was plenty of repeat business, and of course the same people looked at more than one page—but the numbers looked good as a start.