Compared to pulped wood, the Net looks better and better—the price of paper shot up some 30 percent between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995. Environmental regulators are forcing the pulp mills to quit sullying the air and the water, and new mills can cost half a billion dollars each to build. “Like the rest of us,” writes Jonathan Seybold, publisher of _Digital Media_, “the paper company executives read all of the press stuff about the Information Highway, the rise of online services, and the decline of paper-based publishing.” And he says they are now asking, “Why should we invest in a new paper mill?” The result? Newsprint shortages and higher prices. “The fear,” Seybold says, “creates its own reality.”[4.6] More than 100 newspapers either are on the Internet or are planning to be there. The _New York Times_, for example, has used the World Wide Web to transmit a fax edition condensed from the normal paper. A full-grown _Times_ may be on the Net now. The _San Jose Mercury News_ in California not only is online, it offers a service called News Hound. For just $10 a month, the Hound will automatically scan a massive database from Knight-Ridder papers and additional dailies, then e-mail you the latest articles on the cover girls of _Sports Illustrated_, on Afghanistan, on the Chicago Bears, on Bill Clinton, or on any other topic that quickens your pulse or makes you reach for your Valium. From the _Halifax Daily News_ to Poland’s _Gazeta Wyborcza_, newspapers are trying the Net. Even a strike paper, published by reporters of the San Francisco _Examiner_ and _Chronicle_, made it into cyberspace. Some Netfolks preferred the strike daily to the electronic spin-offs of the regular ones, and I wasn’t surprised. What applies to business applies to newspapers: The Net is a great equalizer in some ways; a small newspaper can reach as far-flung a readership as an international daily. In fact, the first paper on the World Wide Web just might have been the _Palo Alto Weekly_ from Silicon Valley. South Africa’s _Mail & Guardian_, a 30,000-circulation weekly, finds the Internet a much cheaper way to reach people overseas than air-mail. Devoted to Russian news, the _St. Petersburg Press_ uses the Internet to serve an English-speaking audience throughout the world. The _London Telegraph_ has shown up on the Net with some striking graphics. No longer is the Internet just for little magazines published by techies and smart young English majors.