EXTRA! READERS TALK BACK!

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.''