Years ago, during a former career in the theater, I made pocket money doing mime on the streets of New York City, and was always stunned at the difference between performing on the street as compared with the stage.

Holding the audience's attention on the sidewalk is a brutal undertaking -- it requires an energy and pace, a ferocity and tightness of delivery that left me totally exhausted within a few hours. The computer world's "new media," as it's called, strikes me the same way. Its audience is a restless bunch. Grabbing them, let alone holding their attention, requires one to reach out with much, much more. This is no world for docile publishers. This is street journalism.

The account that follows -- war stories, in a sense, from the streets of cyberspace -- updates my story in these pages two years ago ("Exploring the Interactive Future," CJR, November/December 1993). At that time, I wrote as a neutral observer, a free-lance writer reporting on Newsweek's early experiments in new media, which began in 1989 and led to news productions on CD-ROM disks. Each of those early CD-ROM productions focused on one or two big general news stories and included text, video, still photos, computer graphics, sound clips, even games and animations.

 As the CD-ROM industry began suffering serious growing pains -- technical capabilities, product distribution, and the audience remain limited -- the focus shifted. Newsweek's CD-ROM team now targets specific audiences (a "Parent's Guide to Children's Software '96" is a recent example). The rest of Newsweek's new media crew has, like many news organizations, turned to the growing opportunities on-line, with a weekly interactive edition on the Prodigy service. In the middle of this process, I was hired to join its team of multimedia reporters.

 We creators of new media talk frequently about how it will change the fundamental rules of the game, and there is some truth in this prediction. But any sea change is happening more slowly and arduously than many would have you believe. When compared to their traditional counterparts (print, TV, even radio), virtually all new media publications are clumsy, consistently undependable, and lacking in richness. With that off my chest, I can also say I've seen innovations arrive with real momentum. Some of those have occasionally been used in on-line back alley rumbles, but they too suggest forces of mass communication that are actually transforming in positive ways.

 Bear in mind that my perspective may be skewed, since my primary job at Newsweek now is to build and write for our "on-line community," a particularly raucous corner in street journalism. The main events here fall into two categories -- "chat," where the experience can be quite discouraging; and "bulletin board" discussions, which can be equally rough but also inspiring.

 Like many news organizations, we've staged a variety of chat forums, a kind of on-line press conference, which takes place in chat "rooms" that have become increasingly popular burgs in cyberspace. In chat, those who are on-line at the same time (called "real time" in cyber-jargon) can type to us, or to each other, no matter where they're located. As the "conversation" proceeds, everyone's messages scroll madly across your screen.

 During one event -- staged last fall just after the O.J. Simpson verdict -- we featured Mark Miller, Newsweek's lead reporter on the case, as the guest speaker in a chat on Prodigy. The event, called an auditorium, began with a crowd of around fifty. Mid-way through the hour, Prodigy blessed us with an alert -- a little window that opens on the screen of everyone chatting anywhere on Prodigy at the time -- announcing the location of what Prodigy considers a significant on-line event. Within minutes, the box containing the audience count showed more than 100. We worked feverishly -- I "moderated" in San Francisco, another interactive editor in New York passed the best questions he could find to Miller in L.A. As Miller struggled to load in his answers, I filled time -- throwing in background information I'd prepared previously, telling people about informal discussions that would follow, anything to keep up the pace. However, as soon as the flow of fresh material lagged, the numbers in the audience box began dropping, as the marauders of cyberspace continued roaming the streets in their desperate search for stimulation.

 In another instance, we featured several people who had been singled out in a Newsweek story on "Everyday Heroes" -- a Lakota Sioux who is bringing wild buffalo back to the Great Plains, and ranching them for commercial meat; and a half-dozen "student-owners" of Food From the 'Hood, a nationwide produce and salad dressing business run by L.A. high school students, out of a community garden in the city's riot-torn South Central district. The audience, to my chagrin, averaged a total of six, rarely outnumbering our speaker panel. (To be fair, the quietness of this event was caused partly by mistakes in planning. No doubt another reason for its low appeal was the poor newsstand performance of the print version of "Everyday Heroes," which raises other questions about whether people really want good news.)

 Afterwards I apologized profusely to our speakers for the disappointing crowd. But they weren't discouraged -- they'd spent much of the hour happily talking to each other, ultimately resolving to try an exchange program. I shook my head in amazement. Here we had spent an evening, each in silent isolation, typing furiously at an empty house. I apologized for its failure; they thanked me for its success.

 What's happening here? Put simply, this is a medium where we're not the only ones doing the entertaining. People can entertain each other, sometimes turning us, The Media, into a mere sideshow.

 One basic obstacle is that gathering a crowd on-line is always difficult, and aggravated by the burgeoning number of offerings to an audience that is still relatively small. According to estimates by Jupiter Communications, membership on the four giants of the on-line world (The Microsoft Network, Prodigy, Compuserve, America Online) ranges from 650,000 to 4.7 million, and only a tiny fraction of them are on-line at any given moment. One day last summer, AOL said it hit a record during prime-time, which is generally late at night, with about 70,000 visitors. By contrast, viewership of ABC's World News Tonight averages 13 million.

 It's my private guess (whispered only to you) that chat will soon prove to have been a fad, despite its current popularity. Its chaotic discussions are too often inane. Even when they're good, many find that tracking a screen of scrolling text is a poor substitute for a good, old-fashioned auditorium lecture, not to mention a night on the couch with ER.

 More promising gathering grounds are the computer "bulletin boards" (called "newsgroups" on the Internet). These are sections of an on-line service where members, at their own pace, can read fixed notes from others, generally organized by topic. Those interested then reply with their own notes, written with as much care or passion as they wish to devote.

 With our bulletin board on Prodigy, we created a feature called "My Turn On-line." It's based on the relatively popular "My Turn" page in Newsweek, where outsiders -- some professional writers, some not -- expound on topics of their own choosing. Our on-line version begins with a focused bulletin board discussion, generally pegged to a main story in that week's issue (a January topic, for instance, asked: What's the proper judgment of Hillary Clinton, in light of her new book, and the growing questions about Whitewater and "Travelgate"?). A symbol in the margin of the on-line story is labeled, "Your Comments" -- clicking on this button immediately puts a reader into the discussion. Whenever possible, writers or editors of the story under debate also join in, and at week's end, I copy all the responses into one file. (The "Hillary" dialogue, for example, gathered 260 replies the first week, roughly 27,000 words, many of which consisted of members discussing Hillary questions among themselves.) I select the best passages, edit for grammar and spelling, then organize them into a 1,000-2,000-word narrative that appears on-line.

 This task is sometimes painfully stenographic, sometimes remarkably educational. The reason is the rawness of on-line correspondence, where writing skills are weak to begin with and, even among good writers, proper grammar and spelling are a low priority. I am constantly confronted with notes that seem completely vacuous. Once they're cleaned up, however, I'm consistently surprised at how frequently something of value lies within them.

 Even opinionated writers acknowledge that discussions occasionally change their minds. On-line bulletin board exchanges seem to produce some special alchemy. Even when no more than a dozen participants gather, these discussions generally attract people from all classes, and from all political viewpoints (mind you, with emphasis on males, and the conservative). As each member logs on, generally sitting alone, an unusual honesty and openness sometimes arises. Last October, following the "Million Man March" on Washington, our bulletin board gathered several hundred whites, blacks, liberals, and conservatives in an unusually heated examination of who is to blame for black suffering. Much of this passion is careless insult, called "flaming," but some is serious. At one point, a Cherokee Indian told a black, "As long as your culture embraces the victim role, you will always be one."

 Although this comment drew no specific reply, others told me in later messages that they had met and kept up with people from other races through the discussion. Some eventually found the correspondence unsatisfying, but they consistently appreciated having their own speaker's corner. As participant James Fletcher put it, the bulletin board "is an excellent forum for different groups to discuss their feelings and not have them 'explained' by the media, or some group that the media use to represent a group of people."

 As we the media proceed with our different experiments, it should be noted that on-line communication can also offer traditional rewards --such as honing our writing skills. One of the great ironies of on-line publishing concerns the odd realities of text on a screen: the tremendous capacity of on-line "servers" frees publications from traditional space constraints; yet the average screen- reader -- hunched over a computer, adventurous mouse in hand -- has little patience for long, leisurely treatments. He's searching for immediate gratification. If he doesn't get it, he'll simply turn to other artists on the street. Perhaps this is why it's commonly said that the most effective communiqu?s on-line are extremely concise. I'm forced to practice this art almost every day, as I compose short notes for announcement screens on our board, and in reply to notes from other members. That discipline, to my surprise, seems to have strengthened my voice and sharpened my style.

 In time, I'm hoping the entire array of on-line participants will develop into a new kind of reporting team, producing stories that are seen less as edicts and more as conversations. For instance, today's version of "the story" might be considered the opening remark in an ongoing discussion; the next piece of the conversation would be the readers' responses, which could contribute not only additional viewpoints but also valuable facts and leads for everyone to follow. We read the results, then respond by publishing again. On and on it goes. After all, the on-line world, for all its rough spots, has created quite a hurricane, which is now slamming against Big Media's crusty, hierarchical authority. If we swim with the rising tide rather than fight it, we'll probably notice the undercurrents more quickly. And, when people are restless or anxious to solve particular civic problems, perhaps these on-line networks will help us hear their concerns more precisely, and respond with more helpful kinds of information.

 That day, if it comes at all, is certainly a way off. In the meantime, it's important not to romanticize these on-line "communities." While they encourage statements of great passion and resolution, their connections can also come to nothing. As evidence, the speakers in our chat auditorium -- with the Sioux and L.A. students -- never followed through with their plans for an exchange program. I once made a pact with two enthusiastic members of AOL to meet at a local event. Not only did I not hear from either of them, my follow-up queries went unanswered. "I'm intrigued that with on-line conversations, you have no responsibility for the other person's response," Neil Postman, a noted technology critic, told a Nieman conference at Harvard last May. "I wonder whether that isn't its great appeal. You can have all these so-called friends, all over the world, and have no goddamned responsibility."

 It's my hope that the news gurus of tomorrow will be those who can redefine responsibility -- ours and that of our readers. If our material is framed in a way that can entertain this increasingly restless citizenry, and that encourages them to entertain, inform, and help each other, maybe then we can hold a crowd on the sidewalks of cyberspace.

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