Then came fax machines and email, bringing the mixed blessing of broadcast faxes and group emails. PIOs who embraced the new technologies helped control printing and postage costs, and reduced time spent on mindless tasks, but it didn't cut back a bit on the volume of news releases clogging the fax machines and email systems of newsrooms and freelancers everywhere.

Now, virtually unnoticed, technology has turned another page. This time, the advance offers something of value for journalists and PIOs alike. I'm talking about posting and seeking biomedical research news on the World Wide Web.

The Internet is fast becoming a busy global matchmaking service, linking PIOs who have science news to announce with journalists seeking story ideas and expert sources. There are two main types of medical-science news outlets on the Web that are used by both PIOs and reporters. Services like Newswise, Quadnet , and EurekAlert! post news releases for a fee. Journalists who visit these sites can access summaries or full-text releases at no charge. Then there are sites like Medscape, UniSci, and Doctor's Guide to the Internet, which accept and consider medical-research news releases. They don't use everything they get; they write news stories based on the releases, rather than posting them verbatim; and they don't charge PIOs or reporters for the service.

There are some outlets that are tougher to categorize. ScienceDaily, for example, is something of a hybrid. A Webzine that does not run every news release it receives and does not charge for the ones it does run, it nevertheless publishes the releases it does accept word for word. ProfNet, a subsidiary of PR Newswire, focuses on linking journalists and authors to expert sources. Founded in 1993, ProfNet maintains an experts database of 2,300 on the Web and takes queries through its Web site (as well as by fax or email) from reporters seeking experts for assignments. More than 5,000 news and information officers at 2,261 institutions see these queries in three email feeds daily. In January 1998, ProfNet reported a record 1,768 queries from journalists. During the same month, the experts database logged 3,200 visits.

That is not to say that posting news releases on the Web makes good old-fashioned one-to-one contact obsolete. Sometimes nothing will do as well as a phone call, an email, a fax, or a even "snail-mailed" note or letter. It would be foolish for a PIO to put all of his or her eggs in a cyber-basket. As Hall says, "Assuming that someone in the press will get up and say, 'I wonder if there's some cover-grade news on the Podunk State website' is dreaming."

Still, there are unforeseen benefits for PIOs using Web news services. One is a blunting of journalists' traditional aversion to news releases, Hall suggests. Bridgette McNeill, a PIO at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, agrees. "Reporters usually see PIOs as adversaries, yet with the online services, they seem more willing to seek out PIO input," she says. "The evolving technology actually may ease relationships between reporters and PIOs. Perhaps it is because they see the online service as the intermediary and not the flack."

Newswise could be called the granddaddy of Web medical-and science-news services. Back in 1991 - all but prehistoric times, the way the world moves in cyberspace - a freelance science writer named Roger Johnson had a brainstorm. Hearing about an electronic bulletin board where a California university was posting its news releases, he thought: "What we really need is a bulletin board where everyone's medical and science news could be gathered together in one place and organized for easy access by reporters."

He opened SciNews-MedNews, now a part of a larger service called Newswise, in September 1992 on CompuServe. For the first three years, Johnson gave the service at no charge to universities and other scientific research institutions. "I couldn't give it away," he recalls. Then the World Wide Web captured everyone's imagination, and PIOs and journalists alike came streaming through SciNews-MedNews' electronic doors. Now more than 300 institutions pay for the privilege of posting their news releases in Newswise's SciNews-MedNews libraries, and more than 1,100 reporters subscribe to SciWire, a semi-weekly email summary of news releases posted since the last feed.

John Henahan, a freelancer from Ireland, recently called Newswise "a service which I find invaluable in my work as a medical journalist." Dana Gordon, who works in the library at Newsweek, said: "We're always looking for tools our writers and reporters might be interested in for news gathering. I've passed along a number of the items in SciWire." Many PIOs seem equally enthusiastic. "My very first Newswise submission was up less than a day, and I received two pretty impressive responses," said Diane Zucker of Vassar College. Jean Kempe-Ware of Lewis and Clark College told Johnson: "I'm thrilled with your service. It works." And in my own experience at the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland, a news release posted on the Web has brought calls - and coverage - from national and international reporters who rarely if ever responded to a release faxed directly to them. Finding it on the Web seems to give the old news release a whole new sheen of credibility.

Speaking of credibility, when online information is mentioned, the issue of credibility is never far behind. It's a concern - and a valid one - for both journalists and PIOs. As they do with traditional paper news releases, journalists can trust medical and science news on the Web to be as credible as the university or research center releasing it. That's always a value judgment, but it's one that reporters have plenty of experience making. The fact that science news pops up on a computer monitor rather than tumbling out of a mailbox makes it no more or less credible. Newswise's Roger Johnson agrees: "Our credibility is primarily in the credibility of our member institutions."

In evaluating the reliability of science reported on a news site (in contrast to a news-service site like Newswise, EurekAlert!, or Quadnet), a good place to start is with the people behind the page. UniSci's editorial board includes scientists from the University of Rochester, the University of South Florida, and the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole. The chairman of Medscape's board served for ten years as a member of the board of governors of the New York Academy of Sciences. A cure for cancer or the common cold, reported on Dr. Gotcha's personal home page, is and should be somewhat more suspect.

For PIOs, there is another credibility issue. Web placements generally haven't earned the respect within the university community that a placement in The New York Times or on the local NBC affiliate generates. In part, that's due to confusion between fee-for-posting services and those that evaluate the newsworthiness of a release before publishing the news it contains. Something I call "new-medium syndrome" also comes into play. A Web placement doesn't look like a newspaper or magazine story. It isn't a radio program, and it's not a TV show. So how can it be news? Television paid these dues in the 1950s, as did radio before it. Now the Web is the new kid on the block. Time and familiarity will resolve that problem.

So what's ahead for the news writers and the news-release writers as they learn to navigate the Information Highway? As a generation of youngsters raised to rely on computers joins the ranks of PIOs and journalists, it will become normal and natural to give and receive medical and science news online. It won't be a phenomenon, generating excitement, resistance, concern, and Press Box columns. It will become nothing more or less than the additional communication tool that it is.