To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Back last September when TIME decided to venture into cyberspace, where no newsmagazine had gone before, we chose America Online as our launch vehicle and Tom Mandel, a professional futurist with a keen sense of the present, as our guide. Since then TIME Online has become a popular destination in this fast-growing computer-network universe. Within the past three months, the number of visitors to TIME Online has increased from 40,000 a week to 60,000, a trend that shows no sign of slowing. America Online, which had 350,000 users in September, now boasts more than 500,000.

Our appreciation for Mandel has increased at a similar rate. As a consultant who manages our presence on the network, he oversees the message boards, starts new topics and keeps an eye on the overall operation of the system. In practice this requires him to be part newsman, part technical specialist and part space-age jurist who presides over sometimes substantive disputes online. "As soon as we opened for business, gun enthusiasts jumped on us for what they saw as TIME's antigun bias," says technology editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt. "It has fallen largely to Tom to figure out how to give them the space to speak their mind without letting the debate break out into a shooting war."

A professional futurist and management consultant with SRI International in Menlo Park, California, Mandel considers that the greatest appeal of TIME Online stems from the opportunity to "mix it up" with staff members and even, every now and again, with the people we interview. "When we had Billy Graham live online, the response was tremendous," Mandel says. "I'd never seen anyone be so charismatic through the computer."

TIME Online will provide more such live computer chat sessions with newsmakers in 1994. And, in response to the most common request we receive, Mandel expects some of the photographs that appear each week in the magazine to become available this spring via AOL.

All this opening and expanding of new frontiers leaves bachelor Mandel with little time for cocooning. "There are no living things in my apartment except for a couple of spiders," he admits. However, he manages to keep up with his wide network of friends both electronically and in person. He even takes a laptop with him whenever he returns to Hawaii, where he was reared. That way, he can surf the electronic waves whenever he's not shooting the tubes off Oahu.