A newspaper's printing press, running at full speed, can be a terrifying but mighty mesmerising sight. Out of a warren of whirring cylinders and gigantic rolls of paper - each the size of a van - the press weaves together tomorrow's edition, at a giddy speed. Then the copies shuffle along conveyor belts, till the computerised shrinkwrappers and labellers take over. Finally, at the end of this long, moving mass, the finished bundles stagger into the waiting lorries. As I scribble these notes, though, I'm standing next to a "printing press" of today's information age. It's a modest box, not even the size of a taxi meter or car radio. But this is the gateway through which several million packets of information flow across the globe each day. This little box and the pencilthin cable running into it are the doorway to the busiest Web site in Ireland. Besides a faster link, The Irish Times On The Web was revamped last week. If you're reading this at www.irish- times.com, you might have seen the redesigned front page and the slot for more breaking news, and maybe you've tried doing the interactive crossword (which uses some great Java applets).
The online edition's editor, Seamus Martin, is standing a yard away from me, by the row of cabinets which includes the router. This is the machine which somehow manages to handle and redirect all these packets of information which are streaming through it at, well, the speed of light. In online publishing, most things seem instant. Unlike newspapers and magazines, where circulation figures take time to roll in from the shops and streets, online readership statistics are automatic, touch-of-a-button, "real-time". A PC monitor beside us is spitting them out, in a fluctuating, endless graph.
The latest official ABC-audited figures show 396,000 visitors a month and growing. Not surprising, then, that the site's link to the outside world - that little box and cable in the corner - has just trebled its capacity, from 640k to two megs. What's that in layperson's terms? "I liken it to the strength of the signal of a radio station - it means our bandwidth is much bigger," Seamus Martin explains. "People in the US and Canada are 66 per cent of our readers, and they should be able to download pages much more quickly."
Even so, he says, if you're stuck on a small server in Bahrain with a quarter megabyte link, you're still likely to get bottlenecks at your end of the equation.
Across the room, marketing expert Una McEvoy is performing microsurgery on the figures. Her PC shoots out the ABC readership stats by country: "66% - US and Canada. . . 12% - Ireland. . . 6% - UK. . . 6% - Rest of Europe. . . 5% - Australia, New Zealand. . . 5% - Rest of World. . ."
Two-thirds of their online readers are male, a fifth are at work, just over half are logging on from home, another 16 per cent access the site from both work and home, and 9 per cent are coming from schools and colleges. Such is the traffic from workplaces that the graph falls off dramatically at weekends. Do they tailor the editorial to take account of the large overseas readership? "Occasionally we might give more prominence to some stories on the Web than in the newspaper," Seamus Martin says. "For example, computer stories, which might mean more for an online audience, such as the big merger between Compaq and Digital the other week - we gave that much more prominence than in the newspaper version."
Besides the breaking news, it now has a growing number of services which aren't in the paper version - such as detailed club results in "Sports Extra". Also in the pipeline is an Irish Ancestors Site - key in your family name and out pop the genealogy records from a century ago. By around May the site will also start taking a live feed from a selected number of Dublin Corporation's traffic control cameras around the capital (and motorists will be able to watch the corporation's computerised maps of traffic snarl-ups as they unfurl).
Knowing Dubliners, too, they will probably come up with other imaginative uses for these Webcams, from broadcasting their street protests to making the babysitter hold up their sprogs in front of the nearest camera, every hour on the hour. . .
The site's technical manager, Robert O'Dea, is giving me a tour of something called the DMZ - "the de-militarised zone".
It's the safety barrier between the internal network and the outside world. A small sticker on the equipment says: "Firewall - Do Not Touch". "Once we start taking commercial transactions you have to have those levels of security," he explains. Now we've reached the Web site proper. It sits inside a row of Compaq servers which are running Windows NT. Twenty-four hours a day. Every day. In this business your system cannot afford to crash. O'Dea opens another cabinet, thunks a hatch-clip, pulls out a fan. Another hatch, another handle, and he rolls out an entire hard drive - all in about two seconds. It's a military precision, it probably comes from living inside these machines.
But how do the stories arrive on the servers in the first place? As we speak, a newspaper article is being typeset two streets away, in the Irish Times building back in D'Olier Street. A copy of the file automatically shunts its way down a permanent leased line to the Web HQ. (The Picture Desk uses use a more powerful ISDN connection for transferring photographs, which are dataheavy by comparison).
At this stage the file still contains all the newspaper editorial system's "mark-up" junk - the commands for turning the text into bold, or headlines, or font commands. So they've worked out a program to automate the conversion of much of it into HTML tags - HyperText Mark-up Language, the building blocks of any Web page.
Now the fine-tuning (the "grunt work", as the industry calls it) begins. Most of the workstations are tucked between mounds of office furniture which are still wrapped in polythene, as if to say "Still A New Industry". They clean up the files by hand (though the more tedious work is gradually becoming more automated), and copy-and-paste it into templates.
Two journalists have been on since 10 a.m., another three will be on at 2-10 p.m., with three on the late-late shift between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., when the online edition "goes to bed". Besides the newspaper on the Web they take care of the e-mail edition, and the news service they provide for the Department of Foreign Affairs for its embassies abroad, and the material for the Ireland @ Home shopping site - and the sites for other organisations such as Intel Ireland and the Irish Farmers Journal. But the core business continues to be the online Irish Times.
With the site's redesign, they are also beginning to take account of different browsers instead of having to cater for the lowest common denominator. "You have to remember that 10 per cent of our users are from AOL," O'Dea reminds me. "That means no frames, no background colours, no Java." America Online must have an awful browser alright.
Martin admits that the online edition could be much more interactive, though this would require more resources. And they've already come a long way - the site has over 396,000 reasons to be cheerful.
Less than 10 years ago, many newspapers (yes, even The Irish Times) were still being created on manual typewriters, on scraps of paper, in centralised newsrooms. Their stories and photographs would be turned into wood and metal, bromide and film. Today, this page you are currently reading - whether it's on paper or on the Net - involves what would then have been regarded as a miraculous journey.
The words and, increasingly, the pictures are born as electrons on a screen. Often they will spend their entire lives only as electrons, travelling from the journalist's monitor to the reader's, in homes and schools and offices across the planet, taking mere seconds to zoom along the networks which now encircle the globe.
Michael Cunningham is at: mcunningham@irish-times.ie