When Charles E. Shepard, one of the best investigative reporters I know, left the projects team at The Washington Post in 1995, I was surprised. He had won a Pulitzer Prize at The Charlotte Observer for his expose of Jim and Tammy Bakker, then expanded his findings into a superb book. At the Post, Shepard helped document Senator Bob Packwood's sexual transgressions and show the rottenness at the top of United Way. My surprise turned to mild shock when I learned where Shepard would be going - to Digital Ink, the cyberspace version of The Washington Post. To one investigative colleague, it seemed like Lawrence Welk trying to do rap. To me, it seemed like a waste of a rare talent, an investigative reporter inexplicably seduced by new technology.

 Then Robin Palley, another accomplished investigative journalist, left the Philadelphia Daily News city desk to join Philadelphia Online, the cyberspace version of the Daily News/Inquirer. What's going on? I asked her, trying to sound supportive but instead sounding, she told me later, confused and critical.

 There has been nothing in my experience to prepare me for the proper reaction to people like Shepard and Palley leaving journalism as I know it. They have moved from the kind of newsroom I know to the kind of newsroom I cannot fathom. On an intellectual level I accept what's happening. On an emotional level, I can't.

 So I stew. I accept that cyberspace newsrooms are here to stay, so somebody has to staff them. But I wonder if, when investigative journalists move to cyberspace newsrooms, they will be given the opportunity to do investigative work in cyberspace. Will they be replaced in the conventional newsroom with journalists of equal skill, if at all?

I hoped interviewing some colleagues who have switched would help me sort out my thinking.

 The first question is obvious: Why switch? Why give up the thrill of uncovering wrongdoing by pursuing paper trails in courthouses and people trails in government and corporate suites for a job that almost never provides release time from a computer terminal in an enclosed, isolated room?

 When they were investigative reporters in hard-copy newsrooms, Palley, Shepard, and many others I interviewed for this article set the agenda; now they follow somebody else's agenda, figuring out how to repackage (and sometimes enhance) the printed fare for cyberspace visitors.

 Why, then, did they switch? Palley did it partly for the adventure of learning something different, partly for job security, given rumors about Knight-Ridder closing the Daily News. "Online content producer," her new title, is one of the top growth areas of employment. Shepard did it mostly to gain editing/management experience.

 Lawrence Roberts, projects editor at The Hartford Courant, accepted a Times Mirror buyout. He had seen an Internet notice from The Washington Post, looking for journalists to staff its online newsroom. He was offered a job and said yes.

Laurie Bennett, now at the Detroit Free Press online newsroom, left journalism for two years, disillusioned with the emphasis on short, bright stories and the general dumbing down of journalism at her former employer. She worried about the undermining of her time-consuming and sometimes expensive investigative craft by cost-conscious management. When she returned to journalism in 1994, it was as a reporter specializing in computer-assisted reporting, but still within a traditional newsroom. Then the Detroit newspaper strike began. Bennett observed that during the early stages of the strike, some of the best journalism about the labor dispute itself was occurring online. "I saw the wonderful immediacy of it," she said. She knew she would miss hard-copy investigations, would regret leaving computer-assisted reporting. She made the leap to the cyberspace newsroom anyway.

 Observing the migration from his perch as Washington Post media writer, Howard Kurtz summarized: "Many ink-stained wretches are excited, want to get in on the ground floor. It's like television in 1951." Bennett, using a different analogy, said, "It's like working for NASA in the 1960s."

 For some journalists, it is not a question of abandoning the written word. They are writing regularly, as before, for the hard-copy version, then revising for the cyberspace version. Their cyberspace stories often contain more inside baseball for intensely interested Web browsers.

 The San Jose Mercury News published a dramatic example in August (see page 33). Working with an editor in the hard-copy newsroom, investigative reporter Gary Webb reports that people who worked for a CIA-run organization helped introduce crack cocaine into mostly low-income, black Los Angeles neighborhoods. The motive? To funnel millions of dollars to the anticommunist Contras trying to overthrow the leftist Nicaraguan government during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

 From the start of his reporting, Webb conducted his investigation with an eye toward the story appearing in the cyberspace version of the Mercury News. So, as he gathered documents, he thought about which could be published in full on the Internet. He consulted regularly with two editors at the cyberspace edition. The result: a well-thought-out, enhanced version of the hard-copy series. The full-text documents and the audio snippets are akin to high-tech footnotes, adding credibility.

 But I'm still stewing: Will the unlimited "space" available online eventually make room for more investigation? Or will the time it takes to re-do the hard-copy version for cyberspace take precious time away from original investigating?

 The next question is obvious: Once the switch is made, what new skills must be learned - and do those skills have anything to do with investigative reporting?

Calling herself a Web site editor, Palley says of her job: "It's not necessarily a straight reporting role. It's more like a news desk role. We really are interpreting, repackaging, deciding play, finding linkages, and then enticing our reporters to go out and grab more of the databases that we want to put up whole."

 When investigating hospitals and other health-care providers for the Daily News, Palley spent lots of time outside the newsroom. She sought out land-ownership records, divorce proceedings, and lawsuits, hoping to piece together evidence. She became masterful at conducting interviews, sometimes confrontational. Now there is no experienced health-care reporter in the hard-copy newsroom.

 The farthest Palley travels during a normal working day is from her eighteenth-floor cyberspace newsroom to her former newsroom on the seventh floor of the same building, and that of her former competitor on the fifth. She attends Inquirer and Daily News story meetings. During those meetings, she learns what stories she might be repackaging and enhancing on the World Wide Web.

 Palley finds this assignment satisfying: "There is nothing that will equal for our readers the value of a schools database . . . for the whole state of New Jersey that lets them pull up their neighborhood school, check how many students per teacher, how much is spent, what are the test scores, how many students speak English, how many kids are absent every day. It's all there."

As a parent, I would use a database like that. But there is more information to be gotten. Who in the cyberspace newsroom will have the skills, desire, and time to do an investigative piece on the implications of the data? For example, if the numbers show huge discrepancies between schools on teacher-student ratios, will any of the cyberspace newsroom employees try to learn how and why that occurred? Palley has the skills and the desire, but lacks the time, and those who replaced her have neither the skills nor the time.

 Perhaps if the cyberspace newsrooms become financially sound, employees will be added so that time for original investigative reporting becomes available. Perhaps.

 Meanwhile, Palley's sense of her role has changed. "We are not feeding people medicine here. We know what we believe they need to know, but that's a very arrogant attitude. On the Web people are going to come in and they're going to have as much to say about your stories as you have yourself, they're going to redirect the flow of your reaction stories off your main story, and they're going to contribute things that are really valid. . . . You've got to let go of some of this reporter's attitude that I steer, and you've got to say no, I listen."

 Be that as it may, Internet users can't be expected to bring to their reading of a database the evaluative skills investigative journalists develop through decades of experience on the job. After James Steele and Donald Barlett spent years researching their now-famous Philadelphia Inquirer series "America: What Went Wrong?" they drew conclusions - summarized by the headline "How the Game Was Rigged Against the Middle Class" - based on the expertise they developed.

 Today, I hear a lot of talk from journalism recruiters and cyberspace newsroom managers about a new breed of job candidate who combines writing, editing, design, imaging, and broadcasting. Rarely do they mention information-gathering, where all good journalism begins. If those training and hiring cyberspace journalists concentrate on how to create attractive graphics and mount databases without knowing about information-gathering and interpretation, where will future Barletts and Steeles come from?

Veteran investigative journalists like Palley could leaven the lack of information-gathering knowledge in the cyberspace newsrooms. But as far as I can tell from my interviewing and reading, the veteran investigative types are being hired for their skills in extracting information from computers, not for their wider investigative expertise.

Here is the big question to which I couldn't get an answer: Will original investigative reporting ever happen in cyberspace newsrooms?

Cyberspace newsrooms emphasize immediacy. The constant updating often means little time for planning or executing in-depth journalism. Lawrence Roberts, who used to supervise hard-copy investigative projects at The Hartford Courant, now works with others' stories at The Washington Post cyberspace newsroom, which is in suburban Virginia. For example, when the Time Warner/Turner merger occurred, Roberts supervised the collection of online information to add to news stories, including putting Securities and Exchange Commission documents online, linking speeches by company officials, and otherwise transmitting the official version. That is useful work, but, in my opinion, it could be done by a keyboard operator with little or no journalism experience. I would rather see Roberts using his prodigious investigative talents to dig beneath the official line.

 For investigative journalists working with hard copy or in cyberspace, time is the most precious commodity. After watching online experts at a Nieman Foundation/Harvard University conference on "Public-Interest Journalism and New Technology" slice and dice "America: What Went Wrong?" to enhance its attractiveness for Internet users, the series' co-author, Steele, wrote:

"In the final analysis, all of these things" - computerized information-gathering and organizing - "are really tools. Wonderful tools, to be sure - don't misunderstand me about that, but basically tools.

 "Time was more important than all of these things put together, so when we talk about the future, whether a story appears on newsprint, whether it's on a computer screen, whether it's a CD-ROM, whether it's a VHS cassette, time will still loom over that process to the very end to be the most significant factor. Time to report, time to think, time to grasp the implications of what it is these facts mean, and time to make sure we communicate the power of what that information says to the reader or viewer. Because unless we do that, unfortunately, we've ultimately failed."

I am skeptical about cyberspace journalists being given the time to do original investigative reporting.

Laurie Bennett at the Detroit Free Press thinks I might be mistaken. "We're close to a fork in the road," she said. "We can take resources from investigative reporting, from computer-assisted reporting and simply repackage. Or we can see the possibilities and move to new levels of investigative reporting, not only online but with a spillover into the print side, too."

Despite my Luddite tendencies, I hope Bennett is correct that the second fork is feasible; I hope she and our investigative colleagues make it the road taken

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