DATE: Sunday, May 4, 1997                   TAG: 9705040064

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: STAFF REPORT 
                                            LENGTH:   45 lines

DATABASE KEEPS POLITICAL TABS

A new site on the World Wide Web will allow people to track the special-interest money funding this year's Virginia political campaigns with a degree of precision that's never before been possible.

The site, developed by The Virginian-Pilot and its online partner, Pilot Online, debuts today at (http://www.pilotonline.com/voter/).

Computer users with access to the World Wide Web will be able to point and click their way to detailed information about which interest groups are contributing to candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and the House of Delegates.

The site also includes contributions to the six party leadership committees that indirectly fund the campaigns of Republican and Democratic candidates. Users can also perform keyword searches for contributions from individual donors.

``Campaign fund raising has become increasingly sophisticated over the years,'' said Ray Robinson, director of computer-assisted reporting at The Pilot. ``It's time the media and the public became more sophisticated in tracking it.''

Chris Kouba, managing editor of Pilot Online agrees.

``Newspapers have a long history of shedding light on the process of politics and power. The Internet is a powerful way for us to share a vast amount of detail about how that process affects each of us in our home districts.''

The site is based on data gathered by the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit organization hired this year by The Pilot and other Virginia newspapers to enter each contribution to state-level candidates into a computer database. It will be updated throughout the year.

Until recently, reporters for Virginia newspapers and other media dug through paper mountains to monitor candidates' sources of money and check their reports for accuracy.

To speed and streamline data collection for the 1997 elections, the state's largest newspapers teamed up. That resulted in the Virginia Public Access Project, based at Virginia Commonwealth University's Center for Public Policy. The project is managed by David Poole, a political reporter on leave from the Roanoke Times and The Virginian-Pilot. KEYWORDS: CAMPAIGN FINANCING VIRGINIA STATISTICS

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