AS IF delivering the news on TV is not enough, Cable News Network (CNN) has invaded the information highway to bring the news to Internet users. With CNN Interactive, the network has successfully tapped a different avenue of delivering news around the world.

To date, CNN Interactive prides itself as the world's leader in online news delivery, providing up-to-the-minute availability of news and information.

In a visit to the CNN headquarters in Atlanta last month during the annual CNN World Report Contributors' Conference, Louis Lettes, CNN Interactive vice president of business development, told the Inquirer that they consider the Internet much more than just a new media at this point.

"A year ago, we might not have said that, but we have moved beyond the infancy of the business," Lettes said. "We realized how the Internet is becoming an important source of news and supplemental information. We've had terrific growth. The management has taken great notes at what we're doing and what we have accomplished."

CNN Interactive proves that the complementary nature of TV and the Internet for a new form of news delivery exists. By leveraging CNN's worldwide news gathering organization of more than 3,500 news specialists in 34 bureaus and more than 750 broadcast affiliates worldwide, CNN Interactive delivers a comprehensive, breaking news and events coverage on the Internet.

Lettes notes that the growth of the Internet compared to other media is faster.

"The Internet has reached 50 million users in the past five years," he pointed out. "With every big event, CNN Interactive continues to scale upward."

The CNN website served 4.4 billion page impressions in 1998, more than double its traffic in 1997. The record date was on Sept. 11, 1998, when independent counsel Ken Starr's report on his investigation of United States President Bill Clinton with regard to the Monica Lewinsky case, was released online. The site served 34 million page impressions on that date.

March 1999, meanwhile, was the busiest month to date with a record 626 million page impressions from users who are following the Kosovo crisis.

April also proved to be busy after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

CNN Interactive has a staff of 170 who work out of two state-of-the-art digital newsrooms in Atlanta, where writers, producers and programmers integrate video, text, sound and graphics into the websites. The newsroom is an efficient way to customize CNN's vast resources for the interactive environment.

"One of the challenges we face at CNN Interactive is that unlike our partners in the Turner companies, we are not just competing with other broadcast networks," Lettes said. "On the web, we are up against an array of competitors_newspaper websites, broadcast TV networks, or with other sites like Yahoo. Everyone is providing news, but we want to provide all the tools to all the journalists in the world."

For its revenues, CNN Interactive relies on advertising, licensing and transactions.

"We develop a lot of creativity in the way we approach our business," Lettes said. "We have to be flexible in the way we deal with people so we've created a variety of other platforms for business initiatives."

CNN Interactive abides by its general business objectives to reach new audiences which CNN TV has not been able to reach in the past. It has also consistently experimented on cross-promoting between TV and the web.

Moreover, CNN Interactive is trying to build the CNN brand on such products as pagers and mobile phones.

"We see the web as having the ability to exploit and take advantage of all these aspects," Lettes said. "Each day, we want to make news more available and more acceptable to more people in more situations. We want to reach people not just through their TV sets in their homes, but also at work, on their mobile phones, pagers, PCs and other devices in the future."

At Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok international airport, over 200 multimedia payphones installed by I-Magic carries CNN headlines updated throughout the day.

With its partnership with Page-Net, subscribers of the paging company receive headlines in several categories--news, sports, entertainment, health, business weather, etc.

Last February, CNN Interactive also launched CNN Mobile, a comprehensive and advanced, 24-hour global news and information service for GSM phones, with nine charter operators in Asia and Europe.

However, aside from being a leading news carrier on the Internet, CNN also provides information about travel, food, health, style and entertainment.

"We want to be a one-stop shop for Internet users," Lettes said.

"Shop at CNN" is a box on the right hand corner of CNN.com offering special information about quality goods and services from dozens of merchants--books, travel, music, videos, flowers, clothes, automotive, computer software and hardware and home furnishings.

"We've faced a number of challenges over the past few years," Lettes offered. "There seems to be a different trend every year. We found it's important to experiment as much as we can without making any big mistake. Our approach is to proceed carefully but proceed aggressively."

Since its launch in August 1995, CNN Interactive has expanded to five other sites_Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Lettes said they plan to include more language networks in the coming years.

Gordon Castle, vice president of CNN research and development, announced the creation of a research and development group with a budget of $80 million. The amount will be spent on technology improvement in the course of five years to build a digital CNN in the future.

"When we painted the picture of where we want to go, we put together a five-year technology plan," Castle informed. "There are a variety of things and projects. Our end goal is to achieve a digital compressed production environment and--take footage from the field and bring it to all the areas of CNN for interactive viewers."

Castle has been responsible for the analysis, acquisition and implementation of technology that CNN employs for gathering, production and in some cases, distribution of news.

The team is working on the process of providing better textual and visual information, like adding catalog to take video with automated closed caption and digitizing data format and making the robotic system take care of conversion for the overall technical content for CNN.

Last April, CNN started a multi-year phased and customized media asset management solution from Sony and IBM. CNN will digitize more than 100,000 hours of archive material built up over 19 years and integrate the digital archive into the daily production system.

The result will be reduced operational costs, increased revenues and qualitative and quantitative improvement in the production of news material.