Circuitous Subjects in Their Time Maps James J. Sosnoski and Ken S. McAllister Over two decades ago, Fen Labalme designed the prototype of a postmodern newspaper that he was then designing as part of a media and technology project at MIT. Stewart Brand, the Director of MIT's Media Lab, summarized Labalme's project in his history of the Media Lab: NewsPeek, a selective home-publishable semiautomatic electronic news- paper that knows the reader, [is] made of material drawn daily from Dow Jones News Retrieval, Nexis, XPress, and wire services, along with television news. Walter [Bender, the director of the project] punches it up on his monitor screen. Topic headlines in different colors indicate "international," "Technical," "Financial," "Mail," "People," etc. When he slides his finger across the screen, the image on the screen slides with him, revealing more text. He runs his finger across a lead paragraph, and that story fills the screen. He calls for other newsclips on the topic, and three come up, one of them colored pale yellow like aging newsprint, indicating it's an old item. Illustrations on the screen in color, such as the map of Cuba or the photograph of the President, are drawn locally from a videodisc capable of holding 54,000 such images, the sort of thing that might be mailed out monthly by a subscription service. When Walter touches an article under "Today," suddenly the illustration comes to life, flames and smoke pouring up, a television voice announcing, "In Mount Bellevue, Texas, today there was an explosion at an oil refinery that set off a spectacular fire. Flames from burning propane, butane, and gasoline towered 800 feet .... " The clip was captured from the evening news by NewsPeek and formatted into the presentation. The most significant item on NewsPeek's front page ... [is] the user's own electronic mailbox .... "It's news only to him, but it's the most important of all." (Media Lab 37) Back in 1981, when ideas like this were just beginning to accrue popular attention, Labalme's NewsPeek seemed a futuristic vision. Now, it reads jac 25.1 (2005)