THE FUTURE of media is online—and the future is already here today.

As the whole nation and Filipinos around the globe remain riveted to the ongoing impeachment trial of President Estrada, online media is playing an increasingly important role in getting the news out as quickly as possible. At perhaps no other time has the Philippines felt the presence of a new player—playing in the big leagues of traditional tri-media, namely print, radio and TV—in a more dramatic fashion.

The nature of the Internet changes the rules of the ballgame, combining the respective advantages of traditional media. For instance, Inquirer.net, the online version of the Inquirer newspaper, makes a strong case for the evolution of traditional media into new media players.

From the moment the jueteng scandal broke out with Ilocos Sur Gov. Luis "Chavit" Singson’s allegations that Mr. Estrada has received over P400 million (around $8 million) from illegal gambling operators, Inquirer.net has responded to the new thirst for timely, accurate news on the Net. With the Breaking News section, the site was able to post news updates almost instantaneously, quickly processing information from a variety of sources such as the Inquirer.net’s own news team, Inquirer News Service, AFP wire reports, radio and TV broadcasts.

The key here is the much-ballyhooed concept of Internet time, with the rising expectations of the online community challenging news organizations to have a quicker response time without sacrificing quality. Many a print journalist is familiar with the frustration of writing an article quickly, only to have it see print the next day—hours after the event.

Previously, this writer had also written articles for the Infotech section in real-time, using the actual software being demonstrated during the press conference itself. Without the online resources back then, however, publication of the article was still constrained by the production schedule of the printed page.

This, however, is no longer the case when your medium is the Web—and it is how quickly print, radio and TV media entities grasp the borderless and immediate nature of the online world that would determine the success of their Internet plays.

With the start of the Estrada impeachment trial on Dec. 7, Inquirer.net has upped the ante with the introduction of the Running Account of the Senate proceedings. This feature has the site putting its money where its mouth is, turning into reality all the hype about media reinventing itself for the Net and delivering news in real-time.

Each day, the Inquirer.net team continuously monitors the trial proceedings and posts the updates on the site almost every five minutes. This is possible not only through an editorial team responding to the challenge of quickly processing data and rendering it in a form easily accessible to an online audience.

The challenge is not only to write the update quickly, but to make the summary as brief as possible to take into account the notorious brief attention span of surfers—which arguably is even less than that of TV viewers.

Writing the updates quickly is one thing, however; getting them out on the Web as soon as they are written, quite another. Through a program designed by our in-house team of bright, young programmers and Web developers, the idea of directly transferring the writer’s thoughts to the Web is almost achieved.

Making the Running Account a success depends on synergy, the literary equivalent of stream-of-consciousness almost coming to mind—though in this case the online reproduction has to be an accurate and faithful rendition of what the writer has monitored on TV and radio.

As the Inquirer.net and other online news media in the Philippines continue to push the envelope, it goes without saying that what we are seeing now is just the birth of this new medium.

While it is not as easy as some might think to make the leap from traditional to online media, the point is that what we are seeing now are just the first steps in an ongoing evolution, which would already seem primitive a few months or even a few weeks from now.

The challenge, however, is for online media to establish the same credibility as its more traditional kin. As always, the struggle is to produce the news faster than ever without sacrificing the content. After all, the medium without the message is nothing.

Moreover, this evolution would depend a great deal on the feedback from the online audience itself—just as a new site’s introduction of new features would provoke a new set of rising expectations from surfers. In a very real sense, the transformation that the Net will provoke in news organizations and audiences mimics the role that all other tools have played in human history.

Even as our ancestors shaped those primitive first tools, so too were they in turn shaped by the very tools that they had created. The fingers, for example, evolved to become more slender and dexterous—more ideal for manipulating these tools. And didn’t the invention of writing free our brainpower, allowing us to use for more creative means the resources previously allocated for recounting oral history?

So, think you’ve already seen the future of online media? The running account of this stage of journalism is still being written.