NEWS ANALYSIS : To Journalists, Technology Is a Blessing--and a Curse : Media: Information Age has seen both a widening and a shrinking of news audience, leading to an identity crisis.

In the end, two impressions are strongest.

One is speed, of everything beamed now via outer space into our living rooms live --images of Tian An Men Square, Kuwait City, fires, riots, O.J.--images like wallpaper, some revelatory and many meaningless.

The other is fear. Journalists, once rooted in their profession’s standards and financial might, worry that technology has eclipsed both. Increasingly uncertain of their purpose, many report rumors and innuendo they once would have shunned, compete with tabloid TV shows for stories and privately wonder whether serious journalism will remain economically viable.

The machines of the Information Age--the satellites and microprocessors and cable TV--have done what their inventors hoped: They have bred more competition for news, more coverage of different corners of the culture, more information in the hands of readers and viewers.

But they also have caused dread among many newspeople over whether they can remain relevant. And that has bred a new searing sensationalism as well as a trend to interpret rather than simply report the news, and a focus on appealing to people who had been choosing not to read or watch news at all.

For a decade, my job at this newspaper has been to chronicle the press--to report on my peers and bosses as they do the rest of society. Now, preparing to move on to other matters, there is a sense of leaving in the midst of a wondrous revolution that has also left many in serious journalism in crisis. Consider all this in only a decade:

In 1984, 24-hour-a-day news was in its infancy. In the White House, work stopped each night at 6:30 so high-ranking officials could watch the network evening news, marking the end of the day’s news cycle. Now the news cycle never ends. News has become intravenous.

A decade ago, cable television was just starting, and most Americans still watched only four or five stations. Now, most homes get about 40 channels.

In 1984, when they didn’t run network shows, TV stations aired mostly reruns and game shows and some local news. Then satellite and channel expansion created an explosion in the TV syndication business, allowing independent producers to sell local stations new original programs each day.

Soon we had a new class of listening friends wandering among us with wireless mikes: Oprah, Geraldo, Sally Jesse, Rolonda, Ricki, Vicki, Montel and Maury.

A new form of pseudo-news was invented--”Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair,” “Inside Edition”--programs that look and sound like real news but have a different purpose--bits of drama without any obligation to chronicle the day’s events.

In time, the audience of the old networks dropped, from 95% of Americans watching TV in 1980 to closer to 59% today. And as ratings fell, the purpose of network television news changed.

Where it was once to bring networks prestige, by impressing government licensing commissions and viewers of the network’s quality, the news divisions today must first make a profit.

Newspapers are pressured as well, in ways possibly even more profound.

With new technology, newspapers have seen their retail and national advertising bases in long-term decline, skimmed off by other mediums. In reaction, newspapers have shifted emphasis away from building advertising rates to renewing efforts at building circulation, including in areas of lower income and ethnic minorities, neighborhoods publishers had tended to neglect. As both print and broadcast journalists saw their audiences shrivel, their role challenged by the speed of technology and public tastes about what can be discussed openly in public changed, they reacted partly by imitating the methods of their new competitors.

One way has been to devote more time and space to tabloid stories--news that may be more lurid and riveting than important.

In the early 1990s, CBS hired executives from its local stations to run its network news division and in early 1992 began airing a newscast that was, as rival ABC’s research found out, “downscale.” CBS ratings surged, temporarily. Rival networks began to feel pressured.

The summer of 1992, after ABC-TV’s “World News Tonight” chose not to cover some new development in the child molesting charges between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, ABC News executives persuaded Peter Jennings and his producer, Paul Friedman, to start doing more of what Friedman called “R&P;” stories--rape and pillage.

To make their news divisions more profitable, networks also became fascinated with prime-time magazine shows that would compete with entertainment programming at a lower cost.

In 1989, ABC had one magazine program and NBC zero. CBS had two. Today there are 11 magazine shows on each week, two every weeknight.

While these shows do solid consumer, investigative and even entertainment reporting, to survive in prime time a big component is lurid stories that compete with the pseudo-news rivals like “Hard Copy.” When trying to launch yet another magazine program last year, one network executive said the goal was “responsible tabloid.”

By this year, seven different network prime-time magazine shows were competing with the tabloid and talk shows to get the first interview with Paula Corbin Jones, the woman who has accused Bill Clinton of exposing himself to her.

Television, however, is hardly alone.

The New York Times, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times averaged nearly two stories a day about Tonya Harding in the month after Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the knee.

In the last year, U.S. newspapers seized with vigor on Michael Jackson, the Menendez brothers and the Bobbitts as well.

The most recent sensation, the O.J. Simpson murder case, certainly would have gotten huge coverage 10 years ago. Simpson may be the most famous American to be accused of murder since Aaron Burr. But the breadth of the coverage has been dramatic. Even the august New Yorker magazine found that it could boost newsstand sales by 50% by featuring a controversial story about Simpson. And on one day at the height of Simpson’s preliminary hearing, this newspaper--for which Simpson is a local story--devoted more space to the case than to all other national and international news combined in its main news section.

Some of the excess is created by the sheer size of the press.

As satellite transmitters have become smaller and the cost of satellite equipment cheaper, more news organizations now cover every story. Ten news helicopters hovered over Simpson’s house the night of his arrest. The Federal Aviation Administration was worried about airspace.

But newspapers, like television, have not moved toward more tabloid news without some thinking behind it.

At a convention three years ago at which publishers began to ponder how to renew circulation, an executive from the Knight-Ridder Inc. newspaper group told the assembled that the nation’s publishers should consider their newsrooms the customer service departments of their businesses.

The problem with journalism, said the publisher’s literature that year and since, was that it puts too much emphasis on telling people what journalists thought readers should know and not enough on finding out and adapting to readers’ interests--a tension that is hardly new.

The publishers’ group advocated conducting more market research, perhaps redesigning the paper every three years.

The move toward building circulation has meant more than more tabloid news. It has also meant better coverage of local news, the suburbs and outlying areas.

It has also meant, however, a significant move toward targeting newspapers more at people who have either chosen not to, or seem likely to stop, reading newspapers altogether, a group the publishers have formally identified as “readers at risk.”

“The newspaper should be fun. It doesn’t have to be serious. It should celebrate people,” the speaker, a newspaper consultant, waxed at the symposium for small newspapers at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention this year. Among the suggested tactics: Improve graphics and avoid stories that seem too detailed, or that jump from one page to another.

Two years ago, at the editor convention’s symposium on ideas for attracting new readers, the prototypes the group produced on new sections for women and youth had no story text, only graphics and pictures.

Where the stories were supposed to go, there were only the words repeated over and over, “Text will go here. Text will go here.”

This tide toward graphics and away from writing may have eased somewhat. An experiment to invent a newspaper for young people in Boca Raton, Fla., with stories that were only a few inches long, and dazzling color and graphics, folded in failure two years ago.

Now the company, Knight-Ridder, is experimenting instead with what it calls “public journalism,” inviting citizens through various means to help shape coverage of major local issues, and even local politics.

A few journalists lately have railed at how newspapers go about appealing to non-readers. Gene Roberts, the editor whose staffs in the last 20 years won more Pulitzer Prizes than anyone else, warned a Washington audience last year that “many newspapers seem to be in a race to see which can be most shortsighted and superficial.”

The press will become “less essential” he said, if it does not cover things that matter.

Roberts and others have advocated that journalists experiment with new ways of writing. For some this has meant making writing more stylish, more narrative.

But much of the change, particularly when it comes to national and political events, is to make the news more personal and analytical. And this can make governing more difficult.

When President Clinton introduced his welfare reform plan, major papers led with predictions about why the plan was already imperiled.

On television, the effect can be even more dazzling.

When the Clinton Administration ordered bombing of Iraq in 1993, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake sat in his office watching pundits on CNN’s “Capitol Gang” analyze the political fallout of the event before the bombs had landed.

“We didn’t know if we had bombed Baghdad or Boston. How could they know the political effect?” marveled Communications Director Mark D. Gearan.

Interpretive reporting certainly can be the highest form of journalism. But there is also a line between synthesis and pontificating, and that line can be hard to find on deadline.

Seventy years ago, columnist Walter Lippman wrote that the job of the press is to bring information to light, not give it its larger meaning or order. Only institutions and leaders can do that.

For the press “necessarily and inevitably reflect and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, the defective” side of politics. So straying too far from information, he wrote, the press will only get in the way of democracy, not advance it.

In private, many journalists repeat the message: We are straying from providing people with information that is important.

“We aren’t practicing journalism,” said Jeff Gottlieb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. “We are practicing capitalism.”

“How many of you want to be journalists in five years?” one friend asked recently during a day away from the office. There were four Washington correspondents in the car, ranging in age from 37 to 45, all at the top of their fields, working for the nation’s best newspapers.

No one wanted to be in the business even that much longer.

“It isn’t the same profession I joined 15 years ago,” one said.

No one protested in the profession’s defense.

That, to many journalists, is the worst of it. Old Journalism has lost its loudest defenders. In the last 10 years, a generation of editors has retired or resigned, perhaps the most famous recent generation of American newspapers editors, and probably the most self-confident: Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, Tom Winship of the Boston Globe, Roberts of the Philadelphia Inquirer (now managing editor of the New York Times) and Bill Thomas of the Los Angeles Times.

They jousted with presidents over Watergate and Vietnam, and publicly defended defying the government over the Pentagon papers. They fought with each other over ethics and publicly derided colleagues, such as Australian-born tabloid magnate Rupert Murdoch and Gannett Co. Chairman Alan Neuharth, whom they did not respect.

Their successors are quieter, more involved with the business side; their profession is less profitable. “Frankly, they have to be more concerned with survival,” said Winship.

They also operate in an era in which the press is less popular, and that has put journalists on the defensive.

“If the press did not cover heavily some of these tabloid stories, they would be accused of elitism,” said media critic Marvin Kalb at Harvard’s Shorenstein Barone Center.

But where is the line between elitism and professionalism?

At an editors’ convention five years ago, talk show hosts Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donahue and Morton Downey Jr. debated the issue of what defined a journalist with the Washington bureau chief of this newspaper, the executive producer of “60 Minutes” and the editor of the Des Moines Register.

The moderator showed a tape of Donahue in 1979 interviewing H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, the convicted chief of staff to President Richard Nixon, and another of Donahue in 1988 wearing a red dress and heels for a show on cross-dressing.

“You’re more show biz than you are journalists,” said Jack Nelson, The Times’ bureau chief.

“Explain the difference,” challenged Donahue.

“I go out and try to find out what I can that I think is important for society to know,” said Nelson, “for society to act on . . . “

“You’re a snob,” shouted Downey.

Five years later, the debate at times seems academic.

Journalist or not, CNN’s Larry King has become an occasionally important voice in American politics. MTV’s Tabitha Soren is a bridge to young people. Rush Limbaugh is a force to be reckoned with.

The effect of these new media voices can be wonderful. The first time a presidential candidate appeared live for an hour on national television in 1992 was on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Voters were asking candidates questions directly on national TV. Candidates were reaching out on MTV and Larry King. All this probably had much to do with the first increase in voter turnout in a generation.

But the technology that has brought new voices into the media also can lower the standards of the press.

And in its inevitable habit of magnification, that change in standards also changes how America sees itself. At times we seem in danger of becoming a celebration of the weird and the loutish in ourselves, in our choice of celebrities and even in our politicians.

Journalism is more than a mirror, a reflection of public taste. It is an appeal to the country’s better nature, a celebration of its ideas and achievements, a warning about its problems. That is why the press has special rights, so it can help make self-government work.

In the decade observed, the technology itself has helped. The challenge now belongs to the people who operate it.