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It's 3:00 a.m., and it's been a long night -- a long couple of days -- but the election returns are in and the stories are all filed. They've already been published on the Web.

Relaxing, decompressing after a brutal day on the job, three of the site's writers remain in the newsroom, chatting over Diet Coke and bitter vending-machine coffee. They congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Sure, some things didn't go so smoothly. The server jammed a few times with all that extra traffic. And having such a small crew, it was murder to keep pace with all Minneapolis-St. Paul area elections. Plenty of people in the audience will wonder tomorrow why there are no rural returns.

But the writers have to hand it to themselves. The November 1996 election is the first they've covered as a team, and it went fine. They wrote some quality, in-depth election preview pieces. They did solid up-to-the-minute ballot results, even a few quick political perspective pieces, slamming the stuff out to a hungry Web audience almost as soon as it was written.

Best of all, the site's staffers agree, "We kicked the metro dailies' butts."

It's true. As they speak, neither the Minneapolis StarTribune.com nor the St. Paul PioneerPlanet.com, the two metro dailies' Web sites, can boast anything like the coverage they've just managed. In the morning, the newspapers will have tons of material online, but so what? "We got it first," our writers muse.

So who are these people? Workers at some maverick urban weekly newspaper that's flexing its reporting muscles online? Employees at one of the Twin Cities alternative newspapers? Maybe a magazine crew? No. They work for Channel 4000, the Web site shared by a television and a radio station (WCCO-TV and WCCO Radio).

Did someone say local broadcasters can't compete with newspapers on the Web?

Well, yes, actually. Someone did.

Take Digital City's Bob Nicholson. America Online's foray into Web community content has resulted in partnerships between the online service and newspapers around the country. But Nicholson, director of Digital City's sales and marketing support, says AOL shies away from partnerships with TV stations.

"TV stations -- with some very significant exceptions -- don't have the staff to devote to the Web," says Nicholson. "Frankly, if you're looking at a newspaper in a given city, you're probably not going to look at a TV station, too. The extent of content they have is not sufficiently strong to make them a real desirable partner."

Possibly. But Steve Yelvington remembers that election night in '96. As editor of StarTribune.com, Yelvington recalls the sting of not being first out with online election returns.

"On the election of 1996, we weren't happy with the way things turned out," Yelvington says. "It wasn't a question of intent or philosophy, but of performance."

He says some factors were beyond the paper's control. For instance, The Associated Press changed the formatting of its election results at the last minute, forcing the paper to rewrite its Perl data parser on the spot. Meanwhile, newspaper reporters in the field were slow moving information to the newsroom, while the newsroom was slow moving material from their desks to the Web office.

"It was a frustrating night," Yelvington says. "We learned a lot."

But Channel 4000 was not the instructor, according to Yelvington. "Actually, Channel 4000 didn't change our thinking about timeliness at all," he says.

"I have a content prescription that runs around four key points -- timeliness, useful, interactive and entertaining. You'll notice that timeliness is right there at the top," Yelvington says. "It's been a prime consideration since we began planning our first online efforts in the pre-Web era of early 1994.

"I don't think television poses much of a challenge to in-depth reporting," Yelvington says.

Yelvington is not alone in that thinking. It's common wisdom in the news trade -- TV stations don't have the resources to compete with newspapers online.

With a little help, such thinking holds, TV stations might put in place a first-class online operation like Channel 4000, or its sister in Los Angeles, KCBS-TV's Channel 2000. Stations might even hope to hook an online audience; in Raleigh, N.C., for instance, WRAL OnLine and the News & Observer on the Web consistently register about the same number of page views each month.

But when it comes to online news content, the thinking goes, newspapers are king.

People will acknowledge a TV Web site's few obvious advantages. Timeliness is one. The StarTribune's own independent study performed last October, indicates Channel 4000 performed equally as well as the newspaper in breaking consequential news stories online. Each was first with important stories 43 percent of the time, while the rival PioneerPlanet site was first 13 percent of the time.

TV stations also have the advantage of living in a news culture that demands timeliness. They are accustomed to working in team settings, as opposed to newspaper's lone-wolf ethos. So that gives TV's online efforts a certain leg up, at least temporarily, Yelvington says, because online operations must be team efforts.

But even those few advantages won't last long, he says, since newspapers are beginning to hire people away from broadcasting to work on their Web sites.

"It's clear to me that newspapers can and will change their strategies and cultures," he says.

But wait a minute. Suppose local TV or even local radio stations also change strategies and cultures. Suppose general managers of all those outlets were magically visited in their sleep by a simultaneous epiphany: "You can make money on the Web!"

What then?

It probably won't be that dramatic, but the Web's potential as a moneymaker is bound to dawn on TV station managers some day. Or at least, that's what Hoag Levins thinks. And when that happens, he says, watch out.

Levins is the executive editor at Editor & Publisher, the diary of the North American newspaper industry, as well as its print-only new-media supplement, MediaInfo.com. In January 1997, Levins wrote an article warning newspapers of the threat TV sites like Channel 4000 represent -- not just to their editorial authority but to their very core business, classified ads in particular. He hasn't changed his stance a bit since then, he says.

"The potential is incredible," Levins says. "Across the country, [local] TV stations don't appear to be using the Web as they could, but in the near future a few stations will be using it to full capacity."

Imagine the scene. It's two or three years from now. The bandwidth dilemma has been solved. You're watching the local news on your Web-ready television and you see a story you like. When it ends, you don't feel you've quite had your fill, so you point your remote at a link to the longer, deeper text version, with its still photos, its charts and graphs, its extended audio clips, its additional video footage, its corollary links. You view it until you're sated, and then you realize you're kind of hungry.

So you point your remote at the ad for the local pizza shop posted at the bottom of your TV screen and you order a large stuffed-crust for delivery.

Having a Web staff big enough for a TV station to place that much material online is going to take a lot of money, Levins acknowledges. But he thinks that when TV stations begin to understand this is their chance to land lucrative online classified ads, plus all those low-budget mom-and-pop shop ads that have always gone to newspapers, TV stations will realize a big Web investment will pay for itself.

At that point, Levins says, TV stations will use the Web to compete head-to-head with newspapers -- at every level. They'll hire staff. They'll buy equipment and designate bandwidth. And they will bring a monster to the table with them: their incredible promotional reach.

Not only will stations be able to sell cut-rate Web ads to small businesses for the first time, Levins says, they will be able to push television audiences to those ads by constantly promoting their Web site on the air.

"That's a hell of a sell," Levins says. "I believe that is going to make them a ferocious competitor to local newspapers, even those that are running really creditable Web sites."

In the end, says Eric Meyer, there is no real distinction between what TV stations can do on the Web and what newspapers can do. Meyer, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois and managing partner of NewsLink Associates, says if stations are willing to invest, they can be just as thorough and complete as any newspaper. It takes money, he says, and it takes vision.

"Whether (they) make any money at it is another matter," Meyer says.

But there is evidence that money can be made.

Channel 4000 is a perfect example, turning a profit for its parent company Internet Broadcasting System in October 1997, a year and a half after its launch. Encouraged by that success, the company has continued to develop sites for stations in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Portland, Ore., and Madison, Wis. In each case, IBS hires all the staff, pays all the salaries and produces all the content. In exchange, contracting TV stations get a cut of any ad-revenue that results.

Jason Primuth, IBS' executive producer, says he sees no reason to believe his company's future is anything but bright. Likewise, he says, so is television's future on the Web.

"As Channel 4000 continues to make a profit, more people will realize that this is a serious venture," Primuth says. "Like anything, the more resources you put in, the more you succeed. We're betting more, because we think it makes sense.

"If we didn't, we'd be pretty nervous," he adds, "because we're betting the farm on it."