When it comes to newspapers, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Twenty years ago, the premiere edition of Newspapers & Technology reported on topics that still resonate in 2008.

Publishers expressed concerns about newsprint prices, which then hovered around $680 per metric ton. At the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, the production department wrestled with the best way to incorporate new technologies: in this case, Scitex Imager workstations that permitted artists to take over the task of composing color work for inclusion in the daily.

And publishers invested millions of dollars into online technologies designed to enable them to reach new audiences. Nobody was sure how to make money from those efforts.

Indeed, 1988, when Newspapers & Technology debuted, could be considered the dawn of great change for newspapers. The colorful USA Today was only six years old; most publishers could only look at the Gannett Co. Inc. product with envy as they continued to churn out their newspapers on decades-old letterpresses with limited color capacity.