The Battle Online   

MSNBC'S PATTI ANN BROWNE is at the anchor desk, finishing up her report on the latest poll showing that senior citizens may be the swing vote in November's presidential race. At the end of her segment, Brown looks up at the camera and smiles. "To see all the stats and the latest polls, you can use the campaign tab," she says, urging viewers to reach for their mouses and click on the link over her left shoulder.

Browne is anchoring "PoliticsOnly!"--a show that looks like any other MSNBC broadcast--except it can only be seen over the Internet. The daily 10-minute Webcast is posted every day at 1 p.m. with a mix of fresh political news. It can be viewed via streaming video on MSNBC.com by anyone with a fast enough Internet connection.

On this day, the Webcast has a story about George W. Bush¹s day on the campaign trail in Texas and a chat with the Wall Street Journal's Bob Davis about the Gore campaign. It is the kind of insider news political junkies can find on CNN's "Inside Politics" or any of the politics-centered shows on the cable news networks. But on "PoliticsOnly!" the viewer can stop the show and click on links for more information.

It is the latest experiment in the merger between the Internet and traditional broadcast journalism. MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, like most media organizations these days, have online components. While their bigger siblings battle it out for television viewers, the dotcoms are waging their own fight in cyberspace. CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Fox News.com all have the requisite rundown of the day's headlines. But they are also experimenting with breaking news online, incorporating video and producing original content strictly for their Internet audiences. MSNBC.com Editor in Chief Merrill Brown says it is about finding a way to successfully blend 24-hour cable news and online journalism. "We're building a convergence," he says. "This is what Internet news can be."

Each of the sites takes on the personality of its television counterpart. CNN.com is a no-frills, straightforward site, with numerous sections containing a massive amount of information. MSNBC.com is a little flashier, with links to video clips from all of NBC's shows and partnerships with Newsweek and APBnews.com, the all-crime-reporting Web site. FoxNews.com has more of a tabloid look, with a heavy load of political news and catchy headlines. "Gore Girls: Graduations and Guffaws" tops a story in Roger Friedman's online gossip column on the latest exploits of Al Gore's children.

According to Media Metrix, a firm that tracks Internet traffic, MSNBC.com was the only one of the three among the top 10 news sites in March. MSNBC.com attracted nearly 8.6 unique users that month, while CNN.com had 4.8 million visitors. FoxNews.com trailed well behind with 1.2 million. None of the news sites run by the traditional print and broadcast media came close to America Online's news channel, which had more than 14.5 million unique visitors.

While their television counterparts have a finite number of cable news competitors, the Web sites have competition from all sides. "It's such a wide universe. Anybody who's got a Web site out there is my competition," says Chuck Westbrook, senior vice president and executive managing editor of CNN Interactive.

All three networks are looking for ways to combine their online and television newsrooms, with varying degrees of success. At FoxNews.com, the staff is trying to make the newsgathering process a two-way street by breaking news online to share with the television staff. Friedman's gossip column has had some exclusives, disclosing that Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette were filing for divorce and that Woody Allen was moving to Dreamworks. And the Web site recently sent a video camera to the South Pole to generate stories used both online and on television about an expedition that included Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell.

But finding a way for the cyber and broadcast staffs to work together remains a work in progress. "We talk all the time. They have someone at our editorial meetings," says John Moody, Fox News vice president-editorial. "Do we interact? Yes. Are we a seamless operation that's never had a hitch? No."

While MSNBC and Fox started their online and television divisions simultaneously when they launched the networks in 1996, CNN Interactive was established more than 15 years after the network was born in 1980. It started with a small staff and a basic Web site that served strictly as a print version of CNN.

"What has changed obviously is the Web size," Westbrook says. Over the years, CNN eventually added original content, then sound and video. The online staff of 500 now produces 12 Web sites, including foreign language sites in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Japanese.

CNN runs its main news site out of a hushed, glass-enclosed newsroom off the atrium in the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Television news still drives the action. A monitor tuned to the broadcast emanating from the studio a few floors above is visible from each desk. When a story is breaking, the interactive newsroom gets a "shoutdown," a general warning over the public address system from the main newsroom heard around the building. Writers, copy editors, sound and video producers sit side by side at their desks in an assembly line, adding elements to stories as they make their way to an HTML code programmer who puts the pieces up on the Web.

With CNN parent Time Warner's impending merger with AOL, the network plans to greatly expand its Web operations. CNN will hire 500 new people and pour $40 million into new online ventures, says network President Tom Johnson. "We cannot be complacent. We cannot in any way stand by in what is now the Internet rate of change," Johnson says. "You either embrace change and include it as your strategy, or you can be left as road kill."

With the help of AOL, CNN Interactive wants to make a run at MSNBC's online dominance. MSNBC.com has a built-in advantage in that it is linked with Microsoft, one of the most visited sites on the Web, and is cross-promoted on NBC, CNBC and MSNBC all day long. MSNBC.com can attract as many as 3 million unique users on days with breaking news like the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash.

"We have a global distribution system that does not have a single bottleneck along the way," Brown says. "On our busiest day we are larger than any newspaper in the country."

MSNBC.com has nearly 200 employees, about half of them in editorial positions. Most are based in Redmond, Washington, near Microsoft headquarters. About 30 are in MSNBC's studio in New Jersey, and the rest are scattered around the world in NBC bureaus. The staff is growing. MSNBC.com already has foreign-language sites in Turkey, Germany and Brazil and plans to expand. In another merger of news organizations, Newsweek.com and MSNBC.com were scheduled to combine their sites in May.

All three cable news networks say their next step is experimenting with providing news on the mobile platform--cell phones, pagers, Palm Pilots and other new technologies that threaten to overtake the personal computer. "It's going to become very dynamic," says CNN's Westbrook. "Our goal is not to get wedded to one platform."

While the online newsrooms are hinting that they one day might become more important than their television counterparts, CNN's Johnson says it is far too early to ring the death knell for television journalism.

"Ultimately there might be a convergence," he says, "but we are not predicting the demise of television as we know it today".