Chicago on the line, telex from Bahrain coming in, the presses are rolling and you're still holding the front page for the earthquake story. It's tough in the newspaper business. But you can forget Fleet St with Ariolasoft's The Newsroom - create and print a newspaper with your Commodore 64.

The Newsroom is a unique package for the Commodore 64/128. In a nutshell, it lets you create a newspaper, magazine or what you will, page by page. You design the banner, make the pictures, write the text and headlines and, miracle of miracles, the printer runs out a whole page at a time. It's all very impressive. Makes you wonder why Eddie Shah didn't buy a Commodore 64.

The obvious snags are that you need both a disk drive (this package is not available on cassette), a printer and £34.95. The price probably reflects its American origins. Springboard Software programmed it - Ariolasoft are merely distributing it in the UK.

The Newsroom is one of those easy to use menu and icon-driven programs, joystick or keyboard driven - you hardly need look at the instructions. The software consists of six sections that imitate the stages of newspaper production. There's also a two-sided Clip Art disk that contains hundreds of graphics for use in your 'photos'. Here's what the six sections do:

You've got to have a banner for your paper or mag, like The Daily Scorcher or Barry's BMX Bulletin - here's where you do it. You have a choice of three large type fonts and two small ones and you can use any of the Clip Art graphics in whole or part. Arrange your text and artwork anywhere in the on-screen banner panel, give your creation a name and save it on disk. You could even build up a stock of different ones.

Create your illustrations here using Clip Art graphics. Use them as a basis for your own illustration or start from scratch using a joystick and the drawing software. The usual facilities include box, line, circle, various line sizes and a set of fill patterns. When you're happy, select the 'camera' icon, take your shot and save it off to disk for future use.

Here's where you start writing that scoop story. This section acts just like a normal wordprocessor, but it's all done in panels. So depending on what page size you choose, you have either six, eight or ten text panels to fill. Three headline fonts are available as well as two text fonts. If you want a picture in a particular panel, call it up first from your disk and position it where you want in the panel. Your text will then automatically run round it.

Here's where you decide how your page will look. You've already written and saved off your text panels (complete any illustrations). The page size you've chosen appears on the screen divided into its panels. Simply arrange your page by inserting panel names into the appropriate spaces on the on-screen page. Then you can save the whole page off to disk.

Print out the whole page, or any panel, banner or picture individually (so you can see what they look like before going any further). Will your printer work? A huge range of printers and interfaces are supported. Apart from the spaces on the on-screen page. Then you can save the whole page off to disk.

Print out the whole page, or any panel, banner or picture individually (so you can see what they look like before going any further). Will your printer work? A huge range of printers and interfaces are supported. Apart from the Commodore MPS 801 and 803, The Newsroom works with the Epson, Star, Okidata, Riteman and a whole lot more. Interfaces catered for are Xetec, Tymac, Grappler and the Cardco range.

If you've got a modem, you can receive or send complete pages, pics and panels over the phone (at 300 baud). Admittedly I didn't try this, but it's probably the least useful part of the package.

So how does it all work out in practice? There's no doubt that you get spectacular results with The Newsroom. The facilities offered in terms of text fonts and illustrations and their flexibility gives you lots of scope to make your work look lively and interesting - you'll be proud of your efforts when the press starts rolling.

My main criticism is that alterations can't be made easily. You have to get the particular panel off disk, into the Copydesk or Photo section, alter the text or pic, save it back under a new name, go to Layout and substitute the panel and then print it out. See what I mean?

And since The Newsroom is a modular program, there's lots of entering and leaving of sections to do, each one involving lengthy disk access - and as we know the 1541 is oh so slow. You're constantly swapping disks too, especially if you use a separate disk for banners, panels and pictures (the consolation is that The Newsroom is remarkably forgiving when you insert the wrong disk). When you finally get to print your page out, you'll find it takes around four minutes - yawn!

The Newsroom is a remarkably good package, and a brilliant piece of programming. It's easy to use and gives spectacular results - there's simply nothing else like it around for the C64/128. But you'll need to spend lots of time with it!