The established areas of online activity: finance, science, and now law, are characterised by the high value which they attach to information and their ability to pay for it. Outwardly this would seem to be true for the media and we would be rather surprised at their omission from this list....

In spite of ostensibly favourable conditions, end‐user searching of online text information retrieval systems among City firms is relatively uncommon. Online searching is flourishing but is very much the province of librarians. Textline is the exception, being used fairly extensively by...