Imagine editing in cyberspace. Imagine going out on assignment not just with a notebook, or a video camera, or a microphone and tape-recorder, but with a "multimedia correspondent's kit" filled with all of the above. Imagine coming back to negotiate not only with news and photo editors, but also with software developers, multimedia design consultants, and people who make compact disks.

For a small group of Newsweek staff members, this circus already occurs almost every day. The experiment began a year ago, when Newsweek took two of its reporters and turned them into a multimedia news team. One, Michael Rogers, a senior writer, had a background in a variety of media and had been managing the magazine's technology coverage. The other, Vernon Church, specialized in science and worked in radio and television. Together, they were to produce the nation's first multimedia treatments of national news on a regular subscription basis.

The publication would be called Newsweek InterActive, distributed quarterly on compact disk. After its first issue this spring, Wired magazine, the hip new voice of the digital age, called Newsweek InterActive "Big Media's most visible accomplishment to date."

Because of Newsweek's early start, a lot can be learned about the challenges and opportunities of the new media world by examining the NWI team's first months of work. In fact, over the course of the year, Rogers and Church gradually shed traditional identities of both reporter and editor. They've started creating entirely new roles, behaving more like film producers and directors.

Each works relatively alone -- Rogers at his home in Oakland, California; Church in New York, in partnership with Peter McGrath, the venture's executive editor and the managing editor of Newsweek International.

Their software developers are in Novato, California, and Golden, Colorado. Joint editing between them mostly happens, as Rogers puts it, "in cyberspace" -- over the phone, over computer lines, on disks hurtling through express mail.

The team's one regularly scheduled meeting time, a two-hour conference call each Wednesday morning, is usually dominated by technical questions -- and the annoyances each medium poses for the others. The editors don't understand why software developers have such trouble making a chart work, or why the CDs can't be shipped on the date they planned. The software developers, Church says, "don't understand journalistic screw-ups." Welcome to multimedia, the new cultural melting pot.

Rogers has a vision of tomorrow's journalist: the reporters (the ones equipped with the multimedia kits) will come to their editors and say, "Here are the still photos we need to shoot, here's the video we need, here's the audio to record, here are some new ways to illustrate this information, and here's my script." Editors will have to be equally adept. "It's definitely a new way of editing," Rogers said one day, after spending several weeks shooting video interviews, editing the transcripts, creating related charts and databanks, and choosing a "stream" of still photos and voice-overs. "You have to care about and have a sense of each medium." For instance: "What picture works with the sound of that voice?"

The NWI team clearly loves confronting these challenges. Whenever Rogers fields a skeptical question from a multimedia doubter, he smiles with delight. At a multimedia conference called Digital World '93, Rogers was asked if it's realistic to expect the public to give up relaxing with the printed page and instead keyboard their way through some complex computerized box. "If you talk to teachers at elementary schools," Rogers replied, smiling, "they'll tell you that the first time they get a lot of kids to read is when they see something on a screen."

That seems to be what multimedia is all about -- catching the restless and demanding attention of the next century's audience.

"This is the first generation that has never watched television without a remote control," Rogers said. His point is that for those under twenty-five, channel surfing has become a drag. These are kids who grew up relaxing with Nintendo, with all its high-tech jinks, the way baby boomer children relaxed with a storybook or a sitcom. "Neither conventional print nor passive television is really attractive to them anymore," Rogers said. Instead, Rogers and a growing number of media leaders believe the new generation wants TV news that can be directed at will: spiced with personally designed charts and polls, varied with inventive graphics and related stories in print or radio, and with advertisements you can choose or lose. In other words, they want something "interactive," the mantra of tomorrow's media age.

The multimedia frontier is now being explored by so many news organizations -- a dozen national magazines, at least as many major metro dailies, a variety of television stations -- that any count of the players becomes outdated within weeks. Just recently, Newsweek's primary competitor, Time, entered the fray with an entirely different approach.

Time's parent company, Time Warner, has been putting out news-oriented CDs somewhat like Newsweek's. But the magazine itself decided to forgo multimedia's high-tech bells and whistles for now, investing instead in plain old text. But Time is sending it over the America Online computer bulletin board Sunday afternoon, a day before the printed magazine hits most newsstands. Bulletin board readers can immediately correspond with the writers and editors (that is, when the journalists have the time to write back). Eventually, Time hopes to add visual features, and hook newsmakers and sources into on-line chats as well. According to Time assistant managing editor Walter Isaacson, when Time made its on-line debut in early September, 8,000 computer watchers "logged" on, breaking an America Online record.

What does multimedia mean? What's it like to work as a multimedia journalist? And how will the use of multimedia change the shape of the news business?

Today, multimedia generally begins with a CD-ROM, a little plastic circle that cannot be added to or easily copied. One CD packs a lot of information -- enough to fill 500 to 600 floppy disks. To make each CD, Newsweek calls on some forty-five people -- software developers, video crews, multimedia design and visual consultants, as well as a photographer and a writer. This team fills each disk with text from the past three months' Newsweeks, a selection of related Washington Post stories, four hours of audio interviews (culled from a radio program called "Newsweek On Air"), and two new multimedia stories, which are created especially for these CDs and account for up to 75 percent of the disk's material.

To create the multimedia stories, Rogers and Church start with printed texts, most of which are written by Newsweek staff reporters, in much the same style as if for the magazine. The editors then "scavenge" these stories, as Church puts it, looking for sections they can "chunk out" into various multimedia features: the photo essays, the fact lists they call databanks, as well as fancy charts, extended footnotes, simulations, maps, and various kinds of audio and video interviews. "We look for any point in the story where people might want to know more, in any medium," Rogers said.

The editors also look for new ways to present information. In its first "multimedia documentary," released last March and called "Mending the Earth," NWI tried out a flexible graph, which creates simulated scenarios about the future. Suppose we begin controlling pollution, but we lose ground in global food supplies. Would the human race survive? Click and you'll find out. Church cautions that the simulations are limited and rather artificial at the moment. But their potential for analyzing public policy could keep a media techie awake all night.

For a June story about the business of baseball, the NWI team created a kind of interactive interview, which it called Face to Face. The feature begins with a handful of the sources Rogers and Church interviewed being pictured on the screen, each in separate boxes. The viewer is also shown the various questions that were asked. With a click of the mouse, the viewer picks the questions, and each source comes to life briefly, answering in video. Click elsewhere on some stories and you get a longer answer without the video (essentially a radio interview playing over a still photo of the speaker).

Each multimedia feature is linked to the main printed text through highlighted words -- a feature called hypertext and the key to the print medium's current role in multimedia. On the baseball story, for instance, the word "salary" is underlined, alerting you that a chart is available on salary ranges. Click on "salary" and the chart pops up. Viewers can always explore the full range of features available by clicking on "library," browsing on the multimedia shelf, and clicking away.

In other words, NWI differs from a magazine or newspaper because of its numerous active features: audio, video, animations, mobile graphics. Yet it also differs from television and film in the depth and variety of information available, and in the way it lets viewers interact with the entire package.

At this point, NWI is available on disks that can be played in two ways -- on television (through a Sony player, called a Sony CD-XA); or on an IBM-compatible computer (equipped with a CD-ROM player, at least a 386-version processing chip, and a system capable of displaying SUGA graphics). MacIntosh versions aren't yet available, but NWI hopes they will be next year. Each disk costs about $ 50, a yearly subscription of four costs $ 130.

The material here does not create the complete, two-way information network envisioned when people talk of "interactive television." That scenario, which is not yet feasible, involves the opening of the eagerly awaited "data highway" -- that vast electronic world where everybody plays, no one's in control, and anyone can get any kind of news or entertainment anytime. In contrast, NWI's viewers cannot go beyond the material they're given on each CD. Moreover, like any of today's multimedia CDs, the technical quality is inferior to standard television: transitions are slow, video images are jerky.

For this reason, people tend to think multimedia material won't be worth looking at for some time to come. Journalists have extra reason to shake their heads. No matter how good CDs get, their manufacture and distribution is time-consuming, rendering them impractical for live news. What the news business really needs is the full data highway, where multimedia material will be delivered live over the phone wires, TV cables, satellite air waves, or through some combination thereof. But Rogers and others believe that even when that day arrives, the people setting the standards in this new industry will be the CD pioneers. "This is where you learn," Rogers told his Digital World '93 audience as he ran NWI disks, after a few false starts, through both a computer and a TV. "Some of our competitors decided to wait for interactive TV. We strongly encouraged them to do that."

Currently, NWI estimates that about 4 million people own CD-ROM players, a figure Church expects to more than double by 1995. So far, these people have very little nonfiction material to play with, which makes NWI hope for a market. NWI is now producing about 20,000 disks per issue. That won't make anyone rich for a while. But Rick Smith, Newsweek's editor-in-chief and president, doesn't mind. "If you look at the expenses versus the revenue to date," he says, "it's clearly an investment on our part. But if you factor in what we've learned about playing in the digital field, it is a clear net plus."

Rogers calls the learning experience "iterative" -- a computer term that means one cannot know step two until step one is finished; step two spawns step three, and on and on toward madness. "No one medium is dominant," Rogers warns. "The script influences the photos, the photos influence the sidebars, and so on. Photo editors go nuts. We can't say, Here's the finished text -- go get the pictures. We want to be able to bring a half-finished story to them and say, Where do we go from here?"

For its new CD, due out this November, the NWI team continued experimenting. First, it took on two multimedia stories, both about timely topics. One was on special effects in movies, pegged to this summer's blockbuster, Jurassic Park. The other was on the health care crisis, a domain whose challenge would be its dryness.

In the health care piece, NWI dealt with the experts' leaden manner by ignoring video interviews altogether. It began with a story already in the works, by Newsweek's veteran Washington writer Robert Samuelson. Church then asked Samuelson to write a version that would be heard as narration. For Samuelson, this meant a different writing style -- dropping almost all the quotes, putting the story's numbers into charts and "databank" boxes -- then undergoing an extra amount of editing.

Samuelson, who calls himself a Luddite and writes on an old Royal typewriter, likes Newsweek's electronic venture: "As a writer, I feel overjoyed we're finding new ways to use what we write." But, he adds, "this was so much like what I always do that it didn't give me any sense that I have to learn anything different. It was like brushing your teeth -- with a new toothbrush. It's still brushing your teeth."

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Church had no criticisms of Samuelson's effort, but he said "a whole different skill is needed to write for the spoken word." Ultimately, the NWI team built the health care story around Samuelson's script, audio interviews with experts, and more than 100 photos -- of health care in Canada and Japan, of American hospitals, and of a destitute family of ten children, whose mother now lies in a coma. The photos generally run with narration and printed captions. And they appear and disappear in a variety of ways -- from right to left, from top to bottom, sometimes breaking into and out of a checkerboard pattern. "It creates a real sense of motion," says Church, the lead editor on this story. "I remember thinking, Wow, I never knew photos could look like this!" The power of these photo essays has led Rogers to predict a renaissance in photojournalism.

At the moment, still photos have an extra edge over video, since CDs have difficulty with video footage. But Rogers believes that "no matter how good video gets, I bet we use more stills. With video, whenever you freeze one frame, it almost always sucks." In a series of still photos, "each image is a composed thought."

The other November story -- the piece on special effects in movies required gathering film clips, a key facet of multimedia productions. "We wanted to face the problem of going to Hollywood," Rogers explains, "and to experiment with entertainment clips and rights problems."

The story seemed perfect for multimedia. Sections of a CD can be replayed, like any videocassette; but a CD-ROM's segments, being computerized, can be found immediately, no matter where the viewer is in the material. All one need do is use the "hypertexted" cue word or turn to the "library" menu's offerings. For example, footage of Death Becomes Her, in which Meryl Streep's head revolves 180 degrees, can be played, with several clicks, in quick combination with still shots of the effect's technical preparation, interviews with the director, and shots of similar effects in other movies. "This seemed the best way to let someone understand how special effects are done, to really take it apart," Rogers said.

There's no anchor or host on NWI documentaries. "The viewer becomes the host. They're the ones asking the questions," Rogers said. When viewers are in control like this, writers must take a back seat. "You give up the ability to direct a story," Rogers warned, "the personal statement."

Nonetheless, Rogers is having the time of his life. Working in interactive media, he said, "is such an overwhelming experience. It's so creative. At this point it's much closer to inventing than editing."

The work does have its frustrations. Technology hassles are almost constant; Rogers and Church estimate that, early on, electronic challenges consumed about 60 percent of their time. They've now got that down to about 30 percent, but Rogers expects technical challenges will never shrink much further.

Once the biggest technology obstacles are overcome, multimedia might well bring society at least three enlightening changes. First, tomorrow's media-savvy children -- those impatient with today's books and one-dimensional "passive television" -- might not get dumbed down after all. It has been said that a society's morality is directly related to its attention span. That's a frightening concept. But as multimedia productions develop, their creators will steadily invent new ways to attract children's attention, perhaps luring them into some thoughtful material.

Second, Rogers believes that the multimedia revolution may broaden the nature of journalistic judgment. Since space is not a significant constraint in the electronic world, multiple angles of a story can now be developed, each "chunked" into a variety of media forms. Suddenly, the best journalists may no longer be those who know how to limit a story's focus, but those who can expand it imaginatively.

Third, such limitless space could also reduce the prevalence of biased reporting. Every reporter who has unfairly slanted a story can recall how carefully some facts had to be excluded and the remainder laid out with great craftiness. In multimedia treatments, that control is gone -- viewers are now in command. So, for example, if Rogers tried to inaccurately suggest there is little public support for a particular change in health care, a careful user of the interactive poll would catch him red-handed. "The seams will show," said Rogers, smiling once again. "Bias may be harder to pull off."

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