TO OUR READERS

By BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL," THE LATE Speaker of the House Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill was fond of saying. As of this week, AllPolitics is more than that. In yet another indication of technology's growing influence on just about everything, it is now an address on the Internet's World Wide Web: http://AllPolitics.com

Sponsored and jointly fed by TIME and CNN, the AllPolitics site will apply the combined journalistic strengths of the world's leading newsmagazine and its most successful cable-TV news organization to deliver up-to-the-minute coverage and in-depth analysis of the 1996 election campaign. With constant access to the reporting of TIME and CNN political correspondents, AllPolitics will provide not only news stories, poll and election results and links to relevant sites elsewhere on the Internet, but it will also feature interactive campaign quizzes and columns by experts from all over the political spectrum.

"On its own, this is a natural outgrowth of the TIME/CNN poll and CNN's treatment of TIME's Man of the Year," notes Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine. "But it is also very much in the spirit of what Time Warner and TBS (parent of CNN) were seeking when we signed the definitive agreement to merge last fall."

To design and deliver AllPolitics, TIME and CNN formed a team of journalists and technicians headed by Michael Riley, a former TIME bureau chief, veteran of several presidential campaigns and, most recently, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard (where he spent the academic year exploring the potential of digital journalism). "Both TIME and CNN have histories of creating new forms of journalism," says Riley. "They know how to invent something."

Critical to this new invention is how to enhance the two organizations' core reporting with multimedia elements, such as TIME's graphics and photos and CNN's audio and video feeds. That challenge belongs to Washington associate producer Donna Freydkin, who joined Riley from her job at CNN Interactive in Atlanta. "Here you have everything," says Freydkin. "Those memorable scenes you see once on TV can be seen here over and over again."

Now that it's up and running, AllPolitics will be updated constantly as it engages its online audience in the drama of a campaign year. Predicts CNN president Tom Johnson: "Interactivity is going to change fundamentally how people receive their political news." Who knows? It may eventually change politics itself.