Making plans for the 21st century.

Dan Fisher, editor of the Los Angeles Times online service TimesLink, finds it useful to be flexible on the ever-evolving information superhighway

Los Angeles Times Online Service Editor Dan Fisher tries to keep an open mind. It provides a flexibility that has served him well.

In 1977, the then-Los Angeles Times automotive writer suddenly switched gears when the newspaper offered him the job of Moscow bureau chief. Fisher spent the next 20 years covering international affairs in such places as Warsaw and Jerusalem.

So, when the Times approached Fisher in 1994 with a new assignment - editor of the newspaper's fledgling online service TimesLink - the fact that Fisher had no high-tech experience did not deter him. Instead, he says, he was looking for a change of pace, had become intrigued with the growing computer world and jumped at the chance to lead the newspaper's online efforts, leaving his post as editor of the Times' World Report section.

"I'd been working in news rooms for 25 years," Fisher recalls. "So when I first took the job with TimesLink, my colleagues looked at me quizzically and asked me what the heck I was doing."

It proved to be a wise decision nonetheless. Within a year, Fisher's TimesLink has grown to become one of the most respected online publications in America, with a subscription base in the range of 20,000. World Report, meanwhile, was discontinued by the newspaper in a cost-cutting measure.

In his role as editor of TimesLink, Fisher heads a staff of 40 and is responsible for all of the service's editorial content. This includes an electronic version of the Los Angeles Times, online versions of several other publications - among them the California Journal, Huntington Beach Independent and Ski Magazine - carried by Times-Link, and added online services such as neighborhood guides and listings of local government representatives. Fisher also answers questions on TimesLink's electronic bulletin board.

At this point, TimesLink, like most online publications, is not turning a profit. Officials with the Times declined to discuss how much advertising revenue the service brings in. But, Fisher is also a realist, and readily admits that the Times Mirror Co.'s tolerance for money-losing projects is not unlimited, and that the business side of the online service has to be improved.

Rosalind Resnick, editor and publisher of industry newsletter Interactive Publishing Alert, in her December 1994 issue called Fisher's TimesLink the best online publication she had seen.

"TimesLink is sleek, informative, interactive and, best of all, fun," Resnick says. "Sure, TimesLink features the obligatory top stories and headlines on its opening screen, but it surrounds them with cool hyperlinked buttons that instantly transport readers to an interactive universe of message and chat boards, shopping, archives (and) recreation guides."

However, as Fisher is quick to point out, the final mix of editorial content is still being discovered. He says TimesLink users generally fall into two camps: those who want the service to include everything that is in the daily newspaper, and those who want it to carry more features that are not in the daily newspaper. Trying to find the balance between the two, he says, is an ongoing concern.

"We felt from the beginning that we needed to offer something beyond what the newspaper offers," Fisher says. "The online audience is different than that of the newspaper.

"We want to be the (online) place you come to when you're interested in Southern California. We want to be a resource for and about the area, whether you live here or not."

Fisher began his journalistic career in Detroit, writing about the automotive industry for the trade publication Steel Magazine (now Industry Week). He came to the Times in 1969, where he continued writing about the automotive world for the next eight years before embarking on a career as a foreign corespondent - a career peppered with several awards and honors for editorial excellence.

TimesLink, however, was another bailiwick entirely. When Fisher came on board, the service was in its infancy, meaning he had to help design the service as well as run it.

Additionally, there were few other online publications at the time to serve as models for TimesLink. What's more, while Fisher was a proficient computer user who had experience tooling around the Internet, he was by no means a techie well-versed in the quirks of electronic publishing.

But Fisher views his relative lack of early experience as a plus, not a negative. After all, he reasons, the online audience for whom he was building TimesLink had little experience with online services as well, giving Fisher the same interests and sensibilities as his customers.

"I didn't have a lot of opinions about how TimesLink was going to develop," Fisher admits. "it was moving too fast for that."

But the one opinion Fisher held steadfastly to was the desire to bring a journalistic sensibility to the chaos of information that makes up much of the online world.

"I felt there was a need to bring that journalistic reliability to the service," he says.

The rest is still evolving - as is the underlying business plan for TimesLink. When it was first envisioned in late 1993, TimesLink was seen as a subscription-based service, meaning that about 80 percent of its revenues would be derived from subscription fees and about 20 percent from advertising fees.

That model has since been reversed, Fisher says, with 80 percent of its revenues coming from advertisers.

Not coincidentally, TimesLink recently announced plans to sever its relationship with Prodigy, the user-friendly subscription online service that has carried TimesLink since its inception. Instead, TimesLink will be available for free on the Internet beginning in 1996.

While the Internet is far less easy to navigate than Prodigy, which also proved a good vehicle though which to market TimesLink, the Internet does provide far more potential users - 30 million worldwide to Prodigy's 1.2 million users in the United States and Canada. A bigger audience, in turn, means more value to advertisers.

"When we originally did our deal with Prodigy, there was no idea that the Internet's World Wide Web would explode this quickly," Fisher says.

The move from Prodigy to the Internet is not the first time TimesLink has been modified to meet the ever-changing landscape of the online world. And it won't be the last either.

"We're going to continue to move and shift with this for a couple more years still," Fisher says. "We haven't figured it all out yet.

"(The growth of online services) is similar to the Oklahoma land rush," he says. "Everybody is trying to get out there. But the frontier wasn't settled in a day, and neither will cyberspace be."

RELATED ARTICLE: Snapshot

Dan Fisher

Native of: Bedford, Ohio Resident of: La Crescenta Age: 54 Education: B.A. in journalism, Marquette University Spouse: Candyce Cain