The purpose of this workshop is to illustrate how relatively low-cost technologies can be used to set up a news infrastructure for a group of newspapers. The aim is to encourage others to do likewise, and to solicit further ideas for improving the service By way of example, services being set up by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa; the services are collectively called MISANET) are described. Our role in this is technical facilitation (first author) and providing infrastructure (other authors);