The adrenaline-charged voices of Nando.net's editors crackle over the phone line. Their fervor, combined with the echo-chamber quality of the speakerphone, makes them sound like coaches exhorting the team in the locker room at half-time. George Schlukbier, vice president and editor, Seth Effron, executive editor, and Eric Harris, managing editor, are describing their plans to cover the 1996 campaign in cyberspace. For the better part of the next year, the editors intend to "put the voter on the bus," beginning in New Hampshire.

Nando.net's editors plan standard up-to-the-minute campaign news along with interactive critiques of political advertisements and of the campaign coverage itself. They expect that their efforts on the World Wide Web will change what it means to cover a political campaign.

 "The fifteen- to twenty-second soundbite is not going to play on the Web," says Harris. "It's going to put a bigger onus on the campaigns to provide better information. In the paper, you only have so many column inches. On TV, there are only so many seconds you can fill."

 Along with its international, national, and sports coverage, Nando.net, a cyber-sibling of the Raleigh News & Observer (N and O), is performing one small experiment in that part of the cyberspace laboratory that is devoted to politics. The campaign presents many media outlets with an opportunity to create, for the first time, original news content suited to the new medium's strengths: interactivity, immediacy, depth. Competition -- from The Microsoft Network to The Washington Post -- will be fierce; all are angling to be credible and authoritative voices in the sprawling digital widerness. At the same time, journalists will have new sources for their coverage: on line field reporting, interactive discussion, the offerings of candidates and parties themselves, and sites of political satire will all provide windows onto the campaign story. A big story of this election is how the Internet is changing the political landscape -- as a new platform for candidate stumping, as a new source of information, and as a new medium for voter involvement; indeed, the very existence of the virtual trail has the potential to change the electoral process itself.

Field reporting and discussion

 Lynne Bundesen, who leads Prodigy's news bulletin board, is already conducting one of cyberspace's more interesting experiments. The project puts a veneer of journalism over what is essentially a year-long, interstate conversation. Sliding onto the piano bench she uses for a desk chair in her living room, Bundesen peeks in on her bulletin board, the glow of the monitor casting her face in a pale blue light. Tapping into the "grass roots reports" topic of her bulletin board, she summons up a report from Jonathan Richards, one of her far-flung correspondents, on the campaign trail in New Mexico:

 The '96 elections are not yet on the front burner here. I took a poll today in The Green Onion, a Santa Fe sports bar, and nobody had given it much thought. Caitlin, the bartender, expressed amazement that there was a presidential election coming up next year, but she said she could tell me who won the World Series, and she did.

 Richards is one of thirty-odd "grass-roots" stringers Bundesen has recruited to file daily to weekly stories from the campaign trail. She calls these reports "democratic journalism" and plans to have a correspondent in every state, with two each in California and New York. Her porject is set within the framework of the informal, often rambling world of discussion that characterizes bulletin boards, in which Bundesen is just as often called on to play "boss, teacher, and hall monitor" as editor.

 Richards has one thing in common with all of his Prodigy correspondent counterparts: he is not a trained journalist. Objectivity isn't the objective here; each of these reporters is simply one more voice on the bulletin board. Granted, they have redily identified their biases at the outset, in biographies that accompany their first field reports. One says his politics "lean Republican, but I have a social conscience." Another, the Delaware correspondent, a Republican National Committee delegate, is perhaps offset by Patrice Fitzgerald of Connecticut, who works with one of Hartford's Democratic committees. "It's going to be different than what would be produced by the professional media," says Fitzgerald. "You will have the personal biases, but it will be fresh. And honest. What the real people are think."

 Discussion on bulletin boards and chat rooms of the major on-line services and Web sites will be another part of the campaign story. America Online is soliciting political op-eds from members; subscribers at Prodigy have already posted questions directly to the candidates and are awaiting responses.

 CompuServe has offered free accounts to all federal and local candidates on its Election Connection '96 area, where they can participate in chat groups and use the service's software tools for creating home pages. After some press stories suggested the accounts might represent in-kind corporate contributions, CompuServe requested a ruling on the offer from the Federal Election Commission, which is still pending.

Clearinghouses

 Traditional news coverage of Campaign '96 will exist in cyberspace, too, but it will combine the immediacy of television with a depth that may make even the thickest of metropolitan dailies envious. In many places, the news will be tailored specifically for politics junkies, and beneath the news will be raw information -- voting records, PAC contributions for anyone with a mind to mine it.

 An early example of this osrt of clearinghouse for political news and hard data is PoliticsUSA, a Web site created by National Journal and the American Political Network, a Washington-based publisher of issue-oriented newsletters. It offers daily political news and polls; searchable databases; political games; updated tracking polls of various match-ups; a politics and policy forum; candidate schedules, and platforms for advocacy groups such as the National Taxpayers Union.

 PoliticsUSA takes a few notable steps away from traditional journalism. In one area, users can "sign" petitions on either side of debates of the day -- U.S. troops should be in Bosnia, yes or no, for example -- that will be sent to local and national elected officials and candidates. "Congress Alert" presents a weekly issue and allows voters to submit commentary right to their lawmakers' e-mailboxes. In "Field Test," users share their feelings on a handful of issues, and voila! PoliticsUSA spits back the name of the candidate most closely aligned with their opinions. Steve Hull, the president of PoliticsUSA, says the Internet is "ideally suited for connecting elected officials to constituents."

 In a paper called "Tabloids, Talk Radio, and the Future of News", Ellen Hume, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program, writes, "The new technologies break the journalist's monopoly, making some of the new news an unmediated collaboration between the sources and the audience."

 Just who that audience will be is a big unknown. The on-line services claim nearly ten million or so subscribers, but the Web's chaotic design makes an accurate head count nearly impossible. Hull predicts a professional Washington audience -- politicians, pundits, and journalists -- but he also hopes to attract users "beyond the beltway," such as activists and political enthusiasts. "If all we get is the professional audience, you'll be calling back here in six months and this will be a Pizza Hut," he says.

 Those who cover the campaign -- whether on paper, over the airwaves, or in the on-line ether -- will find the candidates stumping in cyberspace, too. Their own substantial home pages on the World Wide Web may be little more than glorified billboards, but they will be instructive for the kind of messages they deliver, free of the media filter and time and space contraints. The White House established an early toehold, soliciting visitors' signatures in a guestbook and offering stately virtual tours of the First Lady's Garden. The national parties offer a continuous flow of soundbites and press releases. Lamar Alexander's page gives us his familar red and black flannel, in the form of a main menu, while Pat Buchanan's sepia-toned portrait evokes something out of the last century. Candidates hawk everything from speeches and screen saves to bumper stickers and short bios.

 Writer Edwin Diamond, whose latest book is called White House to Your House: Media and Politics in Virtual America, calls cyberspace "additive" exposure for candidates. "It's a man with a belt wearing a pair of suspenders. It ain't the pants, and it ain't the belt," he says. Most campaign dollars will still be lavished on network air time, Diamond syas, while cyberspace will receive "the loose change that rolls off the table." Mostly, he says, the Internet is "a way of showing they're up to date, current, 'with it' -- projecting a forward-looking, cool image."

Just the opposite image is projected by fake home pages for several candidates. The spoof Bob Dole for President page is emblazoned with the Dole fruit company logo, though we learn there's no connection between fruit and candidate, except that Dole is a fan of bananas "that are just starting to turn black on the outside, but which are not so black and mushy as to be inedible." (Ironically, it turns out that Dole may indeed be a fan of bananas. The page preceded by several months a New York Times report that Dole has pushed for trade sanctions on Costa Rica and Colombia unless they pull out of a European banana export deal that vastly reduces the market share of Chiquita Brands International, whose owner, carl Lindner, is a major contributor to the Republican party.) The fake Buchanan page is more severe; its centerpiece is nearly a carbon copy of the real thing, with the exception of the swastika that replaces the stars on one of the American flags. On the lighter side, we also get a presidential home page for Fidel Castro, "the ultimate Washington outsider."

"This is the beginning of the wild times," says Hume. "There's so much fraud out there, it's hard to keep some quality controls."

 Comprising the Web as well as on-line services, cyberspace isn't just a fast-moving target. It's an ocean of ones and zeros; for every bit of valuable information there are several bytes' worth of detritus. Predicting the look and feel of news in cyberspace by the time elections arrive next November may be like forecasting the weather on Jupiter with a pair of binoculars. But back at Nando.net, in his crackling voice over the speakerphone, Effron does offer this in the way of prediction: "Seven months from now, when you see who the best reporters are who are covering the elections, one or two people will be following the campaign not just from the bus, but from cruising the Net, too." Nora Paul, the library director at the Poynter Institute, says journalists should "be aware of what's being disseminated on the Web, just as a beat."

 Ultimately the shape of news in cyberspace will unfold along with the campaign story. Diamond notes that the Internet attracts newspapers, magazines, and, yes, politicians for many of the same resons: "They're in the same business. Getting votes, getting circulation. Staying in office, staying in business. They're saying, 'Well, there may not be anything more to it, but we better be there in case it's the greatest thing since Gutenberg.'"

 There are an estimated 1,400 sites on the World Wide Web related to politics alone. Here is a guide to some of the more notable windows onto Campaign '96 in cyberspace:

NEWS & INTERACTION