The higher form of CAR uses his computer to access federal databases and statistical archives, and uses polling, social science techniques and spreadsheets to come up with stories about, say, where cancer clusters are to be found, or the names of employees in sensitive posts who have previous convictions. The CAR is still a journalist, but he has strapped on to his toolkit of skills the power of the computer to sort and analyse, and, in the end, come up with a good story.

Michael J. Behrens, of the Chicago Tribune, explained it dramatically like this: "It was the darkest of nights in a windowless room, when the source, perched on my desk, quietly delivered a stunning revelation: city police officers owned crack houses. Years later the source imparted another gem: a serial killer was trolling truck stops in five states for female victims. Most recently, and still going strong after a facelift, my confidant divulged that Chicago nursing homes were secret dumping grounds for violent state patients".

That is a striking way of saying that in the next century, to be good journalists, especially in the investigative role, we have to acquire Internet research skills. Many journalists are very suspicious. Some even have a phobia about computers. They like to feel with their fingers the actual cuttings in the archive. But things have to change. Stephen C. Miller of the New York Times goes so far as to say: "Any reporter who thinks that the job of journalism can be practised without CAR skills will shortly be out of work".

He points out that though most journalists think that their skill is principally in writing, they spend most of their time in news gathering. "Database journalism" is just a way of using a computer to collect and store the information. He tells a story of how he was once watching a top political reporter waiting for a clerk to fax him a wire story from Washington. "Why are you doing that?", Miller asked. "You can read the wires on your PC, and you can filter them to get just the stories you want". But the reporter snapped back: "I don't have time for all that stuff. I just need to know how to write my stories and file them". Miller pointed out that he was wasting his own time, and other people's time. It should not be long before every reporter in the field has a laptop, and files copy digitally via cellphone, or satellite link, or whatever. That way he carries his own spread sheets, contacts list, past stories, typewriter and transmitter in his briefcase.

I recently attended the Net Media Conference at City University – where some of these very bright Americans were the tutors – and heard this story told. A reporter in New York, about to get on a plane to Chicago, notes the tail number of the plane he will fly in, and from the airport lounge e-mails his colleague in Chicago about it.The colleague taps into the Federal Aviation Authority database (and here a Freedom of Information Act is a great help) and looks up the plane's service record. He discovers that a fortnight back the plane was taken out of service to have a fault on the rear door repaired. He emails the information back to his chum. As the reporter boards the plane, and the stewardess smiles a greeting at the top of the steps, he says to her: "Got that rear door fixed yet?"

Pioneer

Another way of using the Internet intelligently is for a specialist journalist, covering, say, health, to access one of the thousands of News Groups which conduct their own specialist forums on the net by email. If a health correspondent is writing a story about new developments in the treatment of, say, anaemia, there is almost certainly a news group on anaemia which can be contacted and whose members can be co-opted for reaction and comment.

I've been an online journalist for about a year and a half. I write political profiles for a database on the Internet. It can be used by other journalists, or by the whole wired world, come to that, who chooses to log into BBC News Online. I have spent 30 years writing to be read in print, or writing scripts to be voiced to a microphone, to camera, or as commentary. All that has had to change. No longer do I go to the cuttings library, look up directories like Vachers, Dods, Roth, the Times Guide, and BBC research reports to get my biographical information. I can get everything I need, and more, without moving from my office seat. If I want information about an MEP, for instance, I can look him up on his party website, the European Parliament website, the EP register, the EP list of committees, and best of all in the BBC's new on-line cuttings archive, which produces on a word-search all references to my MEP going back five years.

In other words, it's all on the Internet (or Intranet), if I know where to look. I have had to learn fast about search engines, and how to operate quite a lot of software, and there's a lot more I still have to learn; but the lesson is that most institutions, such as the European Parliament, have transferred an enormous amount of documentary information on to the Internet, and often treat it as first priority. It was on the Internet that important information about Monica Lewinsky and Louise Woodward was first released. It will become standard. The new websites for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are full of information, and easy to navigate; their registers of interests are quickly accessible, and transparent. The European Parliament's one failing so far is not to publish its Register, but that is changing.

The advantage of an online digital archive, or directory, is that it can constantly be updated – in my case, with political promotions, reshuffles, by-elections, new speeches and events – and you don't have to wait for next year's edition of the printed directory. The Westminster MPs' register, for instance, is updated online about every fortnight, making the annual publication of the register in print superfluous. So what I am writing is in fact an electronic book, in which the pages can be continuously revised.

Writing for the Internet is also different. When you write for broadcasting, grammar, syntax and spelling don't matter too much as long as what you say on the air is clear and comprehensible. But when you are writing news stories which will be read on screen you have to go back to basics for a journalist – no literals, no plural verbs with singular nouns, no hanging participles, no ambiguities. And despite the fact that a large proportion of the viewers of BBCNews Online are Americans (45 per cent), no Americanisms. Sentences like "Trucker hospitalised after sidewalk accident" or "The British Premier is to meet with the US Defense Secretary Wednesday to protest US policy" contain at least eight un-English usages.

Deadline

News Online employs a very experienced former news editor to act as the customer's friend. He doesn't write the stories – he reads them. And he spots all errors made in haste, all the ambiguities, of the nature of "Rosie Boycott talks about her troubled past with Dr Anthony Clare", "Walking up the hill, the house came into view", and the words really used by a BBC correspondent in a piece about the nuclear deterrent: "Seen by many as a threat to the future of mankind, Mr Portillo said..." Online journalists get a monthly report from the story-checker, which helps to eliminate the worst faults.

But writing stories to be read on a computer screen is different in another sense – viewers don't endlessly scroll down a story as they would read a newspaper column. Because of hypertext links, they can click on a name or an aspect of a story that fascinates them, and go deeper into the story. So the structure of a major story can be like a genealogical table, boxes within boxes, each handling one separate aspect, and leading on to another. Some experts don't like "embedded links", or hotlinks within a text, which can destroy the continuity of a story, but they are a useful aid in broadening out a basic story. News Online gets an average of two million "page views" as they are called, a day – the rate of growth in staff, and daily viewers, has only been matched by the number of prizes and awards won – but it can rise dramatically for a major story like the Turkish earthquake, the Eclipse, or the Jill Dando murder. A total of 3.7 million people read our pages on the Paddington rail crash. Our Eclipse site included all sorts of in-depth information, with links to lots of other sites, such as French observatories and NASA, and I could, for example, download from it a map of the transit of the eclipse across Northern France, where I happened to be going.

News stories on the net can have another advantage – they can include audio and video, so you can have test match commentary, or an eye witness account from a reporter, or pictures of the eclipse as it happens, or video footage of a train crash. This gives a broadcasting organisation an immense advantage over, say, news agencies, because of the wealth of multi-media material from programmes it can draw on to round out stories. It can also draw on the expertise of correspondents in a wide range of fields to provide in effect, feature pages on science, education, the environment, entertainment and business. The business pages are especially good and much relied on. It can also be interactive via e-mail with an urgency that a newspaper letters column cannot match.

In short, the computer and the Internet are changing, and will change still further, the nature of journalism. A bad journalist who can't write will stay a bad journalist, with or without a computer, and the new breed of CAR cannot just be a technological wizard, a "nerd with words". He has to write well too. He is no longer just telling his readers: he is listening to them as well. He's interactive. The audience is there, and growing fast, an audience not content to wait till the next news bulletin or tomorrow's paper. "News 24" and Ceefax show how the punters want to find out what's happening to suit their own convenience. Carol Rich, a Professor in Alaska, told the Net Media Conference that a recent survey showed 74 per cent of under-30 college graduates got their news online. Like many other things American, you may not like it, but it's the way of the future.