ON THE NET SHORENSTEIN CENTER www.ksg.harvard.edu ANNENBERG CENTER www.appcpenn.org

The most popular news Web sites saw a drop in users during the Republican National Convention, and creative efforts by sites to give political information in a new way produced mixed results, said a report Saturday by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

"Early evidence suggests that the online audience responded to the Republican National Convention like the rest of the electorate. Mostly, it stayed away," said the report, written by Michael Cornfield of George Washington University.

A companion report found that while 35 Internet sites covered the Republican convention and hundreds of others provided news about the gathering, there was very little demand for the material they were producing.

On a typical day of the convention, July 31-Aug. 3, about one in four Americans used the Internet, but only a third of them sought out convention information. And two-thirds of that group spent "just a few seconds" looking at it, according to polling by Shorenstein's Vanishing Voter Project.

"Americans had almost no interest in experiencing the convention over the Internet," the report concluded.

With television networks pulling back their coverage of presidential nominating conventions, Web sites and political parties have heralded 2000 as the year of the Internet.

Cornfield found that the lack of interest in a convention with little news and shortcomings in the Web sites themselves, contributed to the lackluster Internet interest during the GOP gathering in Philadelphia.

C-SPAN's Web site, for instance, allowed viewers to choose among camera angles at the convention, but the view was "dark, tiny and hard to decipher," the report found.

And CNN.com promised users the chance to see what it was like to be a delegate, reporter, VIP or protester, but the final product was just a set of feature stories.

Some sites had more success.

The report pointed to The Los Angeles Times, which posted a "Diary of a Delegate," with daily entries from a New Hampshire delegate. Site visitors could e-mail her their thoughts.

Voter.com offered an array of material, including columns from pundits, nightly poll results and a collection of the best stories from other sites.

"But for all of its efforts, Voter.com did not pull in much traffic during the convention week," wrote Cornfield.

Meanwhile, a second study by PC Data Online, a Virginia firm that measures home Internet usage of 120,000 Americans, found a 14 percent drop in visits to the four most popular news sites -- MSNBC.com, CNN.com, NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com -- during GOP convention week.

At the same time, an unrelated study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that even Americans who watched very little TV coverage of the Republican convention learned about George W. Bush's positions on taxes, abortion and Social Security.

"With all the talk of how empty and vacuous the Republican convention was, the public still got accurate information about issues that matter," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. "There is learning here."