By JAMES R. GAINES

TIME journalists, like most of their kind, are used to gathering facts from a variety of sources around the world. But reporting for this special issue on the cyberrevolution has been unusual. In addition to asking many outside experts about the impact of information technology on society, we found ourselves turning inward to tap the many experienced sources within our own company -- indeed within our own magazine. Not only is Time Warner Inc., TIME's parent company, involved in a wide range of multimedia projects -- such as the creation of a pioneering interactive television system in Orlando, Florida, and the establishment of its own site on the Internet -- but TIME magazine has introduced its own brand of journalism into these new media forms.

For the past 18 months, each weekly issue of Time has been available on the electronic newsstand of America Online, the fastest-growing of the commercial computer services. Since going online, our editors, writers and correspondents have been familiarizing themselves with yet another new journalistic venue: the ongoing exchange of real-time computer messages with our readers -- friend and foe alike.

The learning continues. Last fall we inaugurated Time Daily, an electronic news summary posted each weekday evening on AOL and, most recently, on Pathfinder, Time Warner's new home on the Internet's World Wide Web. Each week Pathfinder also offers Netsurfers a view of TIME's weekly contents, as well as a look at many other Time Inc. publications; it is getting more than 1.5 million ``hits,'' or requests for additional documents or pictures, each week.

Our next step is participation in interactive television, which is a natural extension of our online work. TIME journalists will play a major role in providing the content for the News Exchange, a video information-on-demand feature on Time Warner's Full Service Network in Orlando that will allow viewers to watch the news they want whenever they want it. A number of TIME staff members have already had to don makeup to tell their stories in front of a videocamera.

TV, once viewed as an enemy of print journalism, is fast becoming Time's ally. In conjunction with this issue, we are co-producing a one-hour program that will air April 5 on the Discovery Channel, covering much of the same material you see in these pages but presented in quite a different manner. The TV documentary, like Time Daily and Pathfinder, is yet another way for us to bring first-rate journalism to as many people as possible -- something we've been up to for more than 70 years.