Bill Kovach, the brilliant former editor who now heads the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard, recently hosted Nieman's second annual conference "to address the issues raised by the popularization of new media."

"Look around this room," said Kovach in his greeting, "and you will see gathered here enough intelligence and influence to shape the future of our profession." Maybe so, but what was represented to the gathering on that first afternoon as "new media" was not new media at all, but old media -- old, old media.

Jim Steele, half of the team that reported and produced the spectacular, 75,000-word Philadelphia Inquirer series "America: What Went Wrong," and Maxwell King, editor of the Inquirer, told how the newspaper went about gathering the information for the series.

And then the conference was shown what purported to be how "America: What Went Wrong," published in 1991, would look "if produced now? In five years? In ten years? In twenty years? What new tools will be available? How will various media merge?" Et cetera.

Except that the new media version was just old media repackaged or, to use a buzzword of this new world, "repurposed." We saw various parts of the series from the Inquirer as they would look on a computer screen. Digestible bite-sized pieces of the series, with separate headlines for various segments. Basically, we saw words on a screen.

 We were not told how the Inquirer's reporters might have gone about their reporting differently (and perhaps more deeply) if they knew they could incorporate video and moving graphics and charts so that we could all follow along better. We could have heard and seen some of the interviews. The reporting and the articles themselves would have become even more alive, even more powerful than the extraordinary printed version.

"America: What Went Wrong" might start with a middle-class American talking head-on into a camera, telling us poignantly how his life-style plummeted during the Reagan years. And then the next character might be Jim Steele, the narrator, explaining what the article (series) would tell us, and showing us a moving graphic of how economic indicators changed (with not just bars on a graph ascending, but showing video of these things -- the components of the gross domestic product, for example) and with Steele saying, "push button here" to read the text of an appropriate law, with key parts highlighted in different colors. And on and on -- a melding of text and video and sound and more. Viewers/readers/listeners could make it even more relevant by plugging in their own personal information to see how their situations compare with those of the people interviewed in the Inquirer story.

 "Media" is a plural noun. New media are simply new ways -- plural -- of communicating. Some new ways are with us already, some are developing now. Some are and will be quality journalism; some are and will be more glitz than substance.

 People who understand all the possibilities and are working to bring them about "get it," as they like to say. A lot of people at the Nieman gathering -- and throughout traditional journalism -- clearly don't. Among people who do "get it" are Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft (who really gets it) and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.

 What new media will offer are opportunities to do our job -- telling stories -- using more and more tools. Some have not been envisioned yet, even by Bill Gates. But he will certainly be wherever the technology takes him. The question is whether any top journalists will be there as well.

According to Gates, the next powerful tool available in this "multi-media" universe, within three or four years, will be full-motion video -- television delivered to your computer screen via ultra-high-speed links.

The inclusion of video, said the owner of The Microsoft Network this spring, "is the future." He was announcing a deal with NBC, which will make its news and other programming available later this summer exclusively on The Microsoft Network in some form or another -- whatever NBC and Microsoft invent together. "This is the hot area," said Gates, adding that the on-line world has "got to change in order to move away from just simply dumping text that came from other places and having that be what's up there. If on-line's going to succeed, it'll succeed because it's generating big numbers and because it's justifying people doing unique work there."

Here is a conversation I had recently with a young executive from Microsoft Corp. about the nascent Microsoft news service. We're talking about whether "MSN," as it's being called at Microsoft headquarters, spells the beginning of the end for journalism as we know it.

"Of course not," says the Microsoft whiz kid. "The news service will have only sixty people or so. We'll just be a delivery system, a distribution mechanism, the new carrier boy. We'll be repackaging news in new and interesting ways, maybe, but not covering it, not originating content."

That's the Microsoft line. "But once you get into it," I ask, "you'll obviously see better ways to tell stories, no?"

"Yeah, sure," replies the whiz kid, whose experience includes work at small newspapers.

"So that means you'll soon be in the news origination business, right?"

He smiles, knowingly. "Sure," he says.

Gates's network is scheduled to make its debut this August as an integral part of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 95. The network will have, as Gates describes it, "a critical mass" of services (news will be just one of many) available to the tens of millions of people who are expected to buy the new software. Gates plans to make the Microsoft Network available around the world in twenty languages simultaneously. (The Justice Department is looking into the question of antitrust violations in the new venture.)

As mentioned earlier, Gates is not the only billionaire who "gets it." His worldwide network will be challenged by Rupert Murdoch, who, on top of buying up television stations and networks and satellite delivery systems across Europe and Asia and Latin America, is now affiliated with MCI, America's second largest long-distance company, which has bought more than 10 percent of Murdoch's company. He has hired away Mark Benerofe, a former CNN producer and Prodigy executive who had been creating Gates's news network, to build one for him instead on Delphi, his on-line service, which is now the fourth biggest after CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. (Once the Microsoft network comes on line, Delhi will slip to fifth.) Murdoch, after all, already controls Fox Television and Twentieth Century Fox and HarperCollins, and the largest single share of the newspaper circulation in England and Australia. MCI's chairman, Bert C. Roberts, told a reporter recently, "Think of the incredible range of news and entertainme we can offer."

Yes, think of it.

Murdoch and Gates and their ilk foresee a new news business. They understand enough of the emerging technological advances to wager hundreds of millions of dollars that their visions are correct.

 Maybe enough good journalists who "get it" will gravitate to Gates, Murdoch, et al. to assure quality new media from those sources; but the betting here is that it won't happen. If the tech people and their marketers call the important shots, they aren't likely to put out any 75,000-word exposŽs. To reach the largest possible audience, their criterion is much more likely to be the lowest common denominator. "New media," sure, but with the emphasis on its glitz.

Meanwhile, what will become of traditional journalists and their institutions? If they manage to "get it," they and their standards can survive in a new and exciting form.

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