A woman in San Antonio, Texas was searching for a certain brand of fashionable shoes. She searched in the way that most of America does now - she Google-searched the brand, "Rapunzel! Rapunzel!" on the internet.

What came up was an ad for those very shoes - in the online edition of The News-Reporter. The fact that the ad was for the new gift boutique Bee Southern in Washington, Georgia, didn't bother her. She called Bee Southern, ordered the shoes, and they were on their way to her in an hour.

The shopper in San Antonio was just one of more than 22,000 average visitors that the website gets every month, one of some 4,000 whose search brings them to the pages - and the ads - of www.newsreporter. com.

"We're just beginning to see the world-wide reach of the internet as it applies to marketing what we have here in Washington," said publisher Sparky Newsome. "It's moving fast and we're planning on keeping up."

Since The News-Reporter website went active last summer, the readership on line has caught up with and surpassed the paper's traditional circulation of about 5,000. Each week, more than 5,000 unique visitors bring News-Reporter.com up on their computers, and they spend an average of 12 to 14 minutes reading the news and looking at the advertisements.

"In hundreds of cases, the readers click on our advertisement, then go directly to the advertisers' website and do business," Newsome

said. Monthly statistics from the paper's host, Our-Hometown.com, document in great detail how many visitors look at how many pages and for how long, where they come from and where they go.

In May for instance, 46 people came to the web site after Googlesearching Nashville songwriter and Washington native Hillary Lindsey. More than 70 people visited looking for Wilkes County ancestors from genealogy sites like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.

"We know we have the traffic, and we know the internet is bringing our advertisers business," Newsome said. "But now we're working to maximize each advertiser's return, so every advertising dollar works twice as hard at The News-Reporter."