Opinion pages fail to stake their online claim.

Three years ago I was asked by NCEW to report on how editorial pages of online newspapers might make effective use of the Internet.

I came away from the project impressed with the ways that newspapers might employ the Internet's interactivity to involve online readers in public issues. I was optimistic, in a talk presented in 1995 to NCEW members at a technology conference and that year's convention in San Antonio, while recognizing that I might well be wrong.

Now I've gone back and looked at what has happened in the last three years, and I've come away impressed with how little of that potential is being realized. Today I am pessimistic, while recognizing - hoping - that I might well be wrong.

An entirely unscientific survey of online papers today supports the conclusions of people who spend more time than I dealing with such questions: Newspapers in general and editorial pages in particular have, to date, failed to take much advantage of the capabilities of the Internet.

Even the biggest U.S. metros, with the resources to do significant things, have fallen into an uninspired pattern: Slap the daily editorials up on the Web site, accessed via a pull-down menu or a button on the front that says "Opinion" or "Editorials," and provide somewhere the opportunity to send a letter to the editor. And that's about it.

Some more engaged papers have forums designed to draw readers into discussion about topics of the day, but seldom are they linked explicitly to editorials - the very newspaper feature that should be generating reader opinion and involvement. And usually, the discussions that do take place in forums are shallow and bombastic.

Few newspapers have given editorials the prominence that their suitability to online presentation suggests they deserve. Online papers could provide a headline on the front of the site drawing attention to an editorial, but few do. While a front-page editorial is rare, the circumstances are different online. You don't browse an online paper the way you do the print edition, so it takes some effort to draw readers to the less obviously appealing pages.

Few online editorials provide links to material that would help readers better understand the issues or that would support the argument - even when that material is abundantly available on the same Web site. A recent edition of The Washington Post, for example, accompanied an editorial on the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones conflict with what it characterized as links to related material, but none of those links was in fact related to the topic.

There are a few exceptions, but they are generally not the ones you might expect. Many of the acknowledged leaders in putting newspapers online, such as the San Jose Mercury News or the Chicago Tribune, have done no better or are even worse at handling editorials than the majority of large papers. The happy exceptions are often medium-sized or smaller papers where somebody has recognized the possibilities and exercised the needed initiative. Or where, as in the case of The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., or The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., the leadership of the paper is unusually committed to promoting a vision of what's important to the community. Or both.

The only way that the Internet seems to be making profound inroads into newspapers is on the other end of the business: information gathering. Reporters and writers have increasingly adopted the Net as a ready and useful source of information. Steven Ross, professor at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and public relations executive Don Middleburg, who have been surveying the online phenomenon for four years, report that almost all journalists now use online tools for researching and reporting. Their survey was tilted toward business coverage, but there's no reason to think that editorialists are lagging too far behind.

And that's important, because it seems likely that a major reason we're not doing a better, more imaginative job of presenting ourselves online - beyond lack of awareness of the possibilities or excesses of marketing mentality - is that we don't have the time or staff to do it. It takes the involvement of the editorial writer to provide intelligent links to include with an editorial. Unless we have used those links ourselves, we're unlikely to have the time to find them for other people.

The same kind of limitation applies to online forums, which invite readers to respond to things they read in the paper. The Arizona Republic in Tucson has done an unusually thorough job of providing readers ways to follow up on editorials or other online material, even to post their own "community editorials." But the responses are dominated by a few - well, a few blowhards. If forums are not to devolve into self-aggrandizement and name-calling, they need guidance from an honest broker of ideas. A moderator capable of gently bringing ignored facts or other views to bear has a better chance of generating a genuine exchange.

And if we do get readers involved, it can't be just to hear themselves speak, or they won't take us seriously. Web strategist Mindy McAdams suggests, "If you don't give me a fair chance to disagree with you, or to shift the argument, to annotate, to question . . . well, I don't have much cause to be loyal to you." I wonder how many editorial pages are really ready to engage in that kind of give-and-take.

Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. The underlying concern, of course, is that as print newspapers lose market share, they will be overtaken by online media, so we'd better be there early to stake our claims. That threat may be exaggerated, or it may take longer before the Internet becomes a major force than I think. And maybe we'll be content, when that day comes, that our work lies passively somewhere in the bowels of the online paper - in a world where it becomes ever easier to read only what you are keenest on, without having to leaf past the opinion pages or risk troubling yourself with vexing public issues.

What we have to offer is something special, something our readers can find nowhere else: ideas about their neighborhoods, their schools, their immediate concerns. They can get national and world news anywhere; they don't have to rely on our newspapers when it's easy to log onto a major metro or go straight to the wires. But local opinion is ready-made for the interactive world of the Internet, and we'll be missing a bet if we don't use that strength to foster both our own interests as editorialists and our publication's role in the community. And if we don't want to arrive after the party is over, we'd better start soon.

NCEW board member Phineas Fiske is assistant editor of the editorial pages for Newsday in Melville, N.Y. He chairs NCEW's new technology committee and can be reached at [e-mail]