EXTRA! READERS TALK BACK!

By David S. Jackson/San Francisco

For media moguls, Cyberland has become the new Klondike. Hardly a week goes by without at least one new newspaper or magazine or television network pushing its stake into the ground and raising an ONLINE banner over the home office. More and more publications seem to feel that if you don't have a claim staked out on the virtual newsstand -- either on existing information services like CompuServe or Prodigy or with your own Website directly on the Internet -- you're nowhere. By the end of 1994, more than 450 publications had embraced the electronic option. CompuServe alone is host to upwards of 200 magazines and 55 newspapers, from Ebony to the Washington Post.

For most of these publications, the motive is strictly commercial. Publishers -- sometimes with little or no consultation with their editorial counterparts -- just set up shop and dump the contents of their titles into a file and send it off. The entry fee is relatively low: setting up a site on the World Wide Web can cost as little as $5,000 -- a pittance compared with the cost of a printing plant. In addition, existing online services pay publications for the right to post their journalists' prepaid contents, and some publications charge for access directly. Many online users are happy to surf through these services, checking out specs in Road & Track or downloading photos of models from Elle. But the most successful newcomers to Cyberland are the ones that go well beyond mere postings of content and make their journalists an integral part of the enterprise. By offering message boards and forums, as well as by posting the E-mail addresses of reporters and editors, many publications (TIME among them) have started an electronic dialogue between journalists and their audiences that is having a subtle but important effect on both -- and, inevitably, on the whole profession of journalism.

Suddenly reporters, their sources and their readers find themselves all together in a new environment, in which the much criticized power and distance of the press looks entirely different. Jennifer Wolff, writing last fall in the Columbia Journalism Review, refers to the new meeting place of press and public as an ``unusual symbiosis.'' In it, she says, ``readers have unprecedented access to reporters and editors, and journalists enjoy the rare opportunity to learn with lightning speed what their audience is thinking on a variety of issues.''

Gary Richards, who covers the transportation beat for the San Jose Mercury News, recently discovered just how this works. He got a tip-off from the message boards of America Online about state changes in rules governing the use of car-pool lanes. He quickly fired off an E-mail message to a government official to pin down the facts, and the resulting story made the front page (as well as the top of the Merc's online news service on AOL). Then Richards went back online to field more than a dozen messages from readers, including one that prompted a follow-up story. ``There's a lot of good stuff out there,'' he says. ``You just have to have the patience to weed through it.''

The vast labyrinths of computer data bases do indeed offer a lot of potential source material to weed through. Reporters now regularly troll the Internet for stories in the same way they used to prowl the corridors of City Hall. The tradecraft is a little different, but journalists are learning fast. Last October more than 300 of them turned out for a four-day seminar on ``computer-assisted reporting'' in Santa Clara, California, where they were told how to use a computer to research everything from medical data bases to campaign contributions. A similar seminar on the East Coast was an even bigger draw.

Some newspapers, including the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer, give their reporters free Internet accounts and encourage them to use them. ``It's a great tool,'' says News & Observer reporter Kay McFadden, who has broken several stories about IBM thanks to E-mail tipsters inside the normally tight-lipped corporation. ``E-mail,'' she says, ``allows you to virtually walk the corridors of IBM.'' In Atlanta, Journal-Constitution reporter Carrie Teegardin routinely logs onto a data base at the University of Michigan to collect census data for her stories on demographics. ``It can be frustrating to navigate because there's so much in there,'' she says, ``but it's immensely helpful.''

It can also be hazardous. Adam Bauman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, thought he had written a pretty good story about how a government-funded computer at one of the nation's nuclear weapons labs had been used to store more than 1,000 pornographic images on the Internet. When he later logged onto the WELL bulletin-board service, he found he'd been flamed to a crisp. ``Misleading,'' complained one member. ``Excrement!'' cried another. He got so much electronic hate mail that he had to turn off his mailbox. ``The impression I got was, `We don't want snoopy reporters in here. This is our playground, and you're not welcome,' '' Bauman said later. Bauman was hardly the first journalist to get beaten up in cyberspace. Every reporter who ventures there soon learns how prickly its inhabitants can be about stories that reinforce the stereotype of the Net as a place where only spies, hackers and child molesters live. Editors are also discovering that the information highway is a two-way street: no matter what they print about gun control, for example, a flood of angry E-mail is almost sure to follow. While few editors will admit to being influenced by such online pressure (unless, of course, it points out an error), most journalists are likely to take the complaints into account in future stories -- and there's nothing wrong with that. A healthy dialogue with readers can be productive, but it also tests some of the rules and conventions of the Net. Though the context of most bulletin- board exchanges is closer to that of a cocktail party than it is to a press conference, prudent journalists must assume that their E-mail postings carry the same legal risks as print or broadcast information. But the law in cyberspace is still being written. In most ways, however, reporters are finding online reporting not all that different from the old-fashioned kind. Many are even heartened by the belief that the growing glut of information in the digital age will make their job of sifting, analyzing and editing the news even more valuable. Says Bill Mitchell, electronic publishing director of the San Jose Mercury News: ``There has been no technological development that will threaten a careful, enterprising and accurate reporter.'' But there are plenty of wired observers out there ready to pounce on a sloppy sentence or a mushy thought and hold a journalist's feet to the fire -- and there's nothing wrong with that either.