There is no real dispute. The combined power of pictures, graphics, audio, text and interactivity available to millions of people online is the most significant change in mass communication since television. Combining these media is the essential definition of multimedia. To have this power on the Internet in the form of the World Wide Web creates opportunities-and dangers-past our reckoning.

There are credible people who argue the Web is the most potentially powerful communications development since the invention of movable type.

That remains to be seen, but if proven so, few who understand what is happening here will be surprised.

Yet, this power at the beginning stages has been has often been the province of the entertainment and retail industries, with real reporters desperately trying to catch up and publish online newspapers, magazines, Internet radio shows and even video. They are increasingly, but somewhat slowly, finding success a struggle compared to sites that offer fun, distraction, and most disturbing of all, material masquerading as journalism.

Like all forces, there are equal and opposite reactions. The great power of the World Wide Web does indeed make everyone a potential reporter, editor, producer and publisher. But does every person who aspires to be a journalist have the skill, the craft and the discipline to carry this grave power with equal responsibility?

"Who is a journalist?" asks Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Georgetown University. "Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that there is more to being a journalist than simply being heard. A thousand people may take up the microphone in karaoke, and yet not one of them may be a singer."

True students of the ancient-and modern-craft of journalism must take our rightful places and provide quality alternatives to the parvenus, the hustlers and the posers populating the Web.

The challenges are supreme and historic. Quite simply, this is a new medium, and the old models atrophying in their limited forms cannot really be used in true multimedia. Historically, each new medium has been made of the same stuff as the preceding medium.

For example, the first movies were little more than filmed stage plays; the first radio news was mostly a promotion for newspapers and consisted of reading print stories over the air; the original television programs were mainly transferred radio shows.

This pattern holds for modern journalism as well, from the expensive failure of teletext to many of today's online newspapers, which offer little more than reprints of the daily paper. Truly fresh, unencumbered approaches, may be found looking to our best colleges and universities, where students and forward-thinking professors are not stained with the soiled imprimatur of a flailing newsroom.

At the same time, the now traditional, but hard-won and hard-kept standards of good journalism and use them as a foundation on which to build a solid new world of news and information.

First-class journalism, broadcast and communication schools inveigh against sloppy reporting, editing and producing, and try to instill in their students the demands for accuracy, balance and fairness. Those standards, so important to the profession, have to be carried into the new medium as well. Telling accurate, fair and thorough stories in the age before us must take place on the mass media of the future: the World Wide Web segment of the Internet.

Building on those broad charges, the first comprehensive online journalism production course in the United States was developed at San Francisco State University. The first version of NewsPort (http://NewsPort.sfsu.edu) launched in May 1996 and has kept advancing on-line since.

There were some natural advantages to the enterprise.

First, it is located in San Francisco, truly the heart of the new information order. People from Silicon Valley to our south, and Multimedia Gulch, a few miles to the north of campus, knew about the university's journalism department and agreed to help.

Second, early on there were more Web servers and on-line users per capita in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else in the nation.

Third, the student body that has been as diverse in interests and goals and ethnicity as can be found anywhere. They have been open-minded and, most importantly, driven to become the journalists of the 21st century.

Some generous support, both financial and intellectual, enabled to launch this ambitious experiment. In the textbook and this accompanying Web site - as well as the Instructor's Manual that is available to every teacher - are the results and lessons of the prototype.

Before you is a chart, a map if you will, on how to get started, to avoid traps, to overcome high-tech anxieties and capitalize on successes. The aim is to share the hard-won knowledge as news people do, not as gearheads.

This is very much an evolutionary adventure, one that will appeal to the open minded, the exploratory, the truly fascinated about their world. In short-those with a genuine journalistic spirit.

The textbook, Instructor's Manual and this site are very much an inclusive set of materials about journalism, not just a specialty book about one aspect of the future of our craft, our calling, our mission. It is a survey for our present and future, taking our hard-won lessons of the past into the 21st century.

It is specifically designed for students and teachers of news and information, whether they are in journalism, broadcast or communications schools or related curriculums. But it is also very much for the self-taught, the distance learners, and the professionally - or personally - curious. A love of true journalism and the future is all that is required.

The result will be thousands of new writers, reporters, editors, producers and publishers online who can honestly call themselves journalists, bringing accuracy, attribution, thoroughness, fairness and compassion to the newsrooms of this new century.