DETROIT — David Akerley is a high school dropout and an auto mechanic with an alter ego.

        Most people know him as DJ, owner of DJ's Strut and Brake Shop in Troy, Mich., a small but busy auto repair garage.

        The only hint that he is more than a mechanic is in the Netscape T-shirt he always wears. Mr. Akerley bought two dozen of them a couple years ago.

David Akerley works as Cyber Paperboy in his auto-repair shop. (Detroit Free Press photo) | ZOOM |

        But almost hourly during the work day, 44-year-old Mr. Akerley washes the grease off his hands and heads over to a cramped corner of the garage where he sits in front of a bank of four networked computers and becomes Cyber Paperboy, the editor, publisher and sole reporter of a Web site that gets more than 80,000 visitors a month, almost a million a year.

        Sometimes, when the mechanic works as the Cyber Paperboy, customers have to wait at the counter, and repair jobs get put on hold.

        “News is only news if it's fresh,” Mr. Akerley said. “I try to make it easy for my readers to instantly know what's happening anywhere.”

        Even at night and at home, where the divorced Mr. Akerley has custody of his 11-year-old son, Justin, he's always online before another bank of four computers.

        Mr. Akerley is what is known on the Net as an aggregator, a collector of news reports. He doesn't do any original reporting. He gathers stories that other online sources are publishing and puts a summary sentence or two on his www.cyberpaperboy.com site with a hyperlink that goes to the Web site containing the original report.

        “I'm like a paperboy. I just deliver the news on my site. Only I have news from all over, and it's new all the time.”

        He started the site four years ago. At first, it was just a personal collection of Internet bookmarks of his favorite sites. But then, as he discovered more and more news of interest, the single main page grew to encompass more than 500 pages of information.

        “I make maybe $100 a month from the site,” he said with a shrug. “It doesn't meet expenses, but I don't do this to get rich.”

        He does it because he is a news junkie. He grew up the eldest of three boys in a blue-collar family in Warren, Mich. He got hooked on news watching Walter Cronkite with his father, Frank, now a retired machinist.

        “I just thought, wow, what a terrific job, telling people the news,” he recalls.

        Mr. Akerley loves to tinker and he dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to work as a mechanic. About six years ago, he discovered the Internet, and he started tinkering with it, too, learning the HTML coding that is the language of the World Wide Web.

        “It was like the whole world opened up to me,” he said. “I realized it was easy to make a Web page. And if you know how to search out the news, which I'm pretty good at, you can be just like the big guys.”

        Indeed, regularly, Mr. Akerley beats Internet bad boy Matt Drudge, the original aggregator. “I know the times of day when Drudge is least active,” Mr. Akerley said. “So I try to scoop him.”

        Mr. Akerley gets regular e-mail from fans throughout the United States and as far away as Australia.

        “I really feel a responsibility to my readers,” he said. “A lot of people are depending on me to be there for them.”

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