SYDNEY, Australia -- It's hailing in Australia. Do you know where your kids are?

Five years ago, that would have been a stupid question, particularly if you didn't live in Australia. But these days it's quite reasonable. Just ask Sydney Morning Herald Online Editor Tom Burton.

"Matt Drudge is a hail freak," Burton says as he relaxes in downtown Sydney, grinning. "He always links to our hail stories. And when he does, we get this incredible surge in traffic."

Forget the overwhelming draw of the 2000 Olympics. Drudge readers in Fresno and Dallas and everywhere else, apparently, have long been clicking onto the Sydney Morning Herald Web site to read about common hail pelting streets and homes thousands of miles away.

It would be easy to imagine the hard-working journos at the Herald, one of Australia's top two newspapers, feeling isolated on their patch of sand at the bottom of the globe. After all, many Australians have long complained about their position in the big geographic scheme of things, about the "tyranny of isolation."

But thanks in large part to the Web, that's simply not the case, regardless of whether the Olympics are in town. In fact, according to Burton, 30 percent of the site's roughly 580,000 unique monthly visitors live outside Australia.

"The Web has just crunched all that distance and time," he says.

The result is that if you're from the United States and you step into the Herald's editorial offices that fill the 27th floor of a sleek downtown Sydney skyscraper, you simply don't feel as though you're in an exotic land all that far from home.

Burton sees it. He talks about the appeal of celebrity stories on the site. ("Our readers are not all that interested in the World Trade Organization," he says. "They're much more interested in Tom Cruise.") He talks about competition in Australia from niche sites, based worlds away. ("People say, 'Why don't you put movie reviews on the site?' I say, 'You've got 32 great Hollywood sites that just kill us.' ") He even talks about Monica Lewinsky, and how the biggest traffic generator in Herald Web history was the Starr Report.

Given that narrow divide, Burton often studies U.S news sites. He gleans a lot, he says. Much of what he learns, he adds, is what not to do.

"We've been freaked by what has happened in the U.S., and how our newspaper peers have lost the [online news] market," Burton says. "We're determined not to fall into the same trap. We had the wake-up call from the U.S."

The Herald's site looks like a lot of good, clean news sites with a three-column design. Top stories run down the center. (Breaking stories on the Australian equestrian team's Olympics victory and East Timor politics were featured recently.) Big stories often include photos and links to audio or video components. The left column features links to various newspaper sections, as well as to e-commerce sites owned by the Herald's parent company, Fairfax. Links to smaller stories run down the right side.

Burton believes the site has a sharper news focus than some U.S. news sites.

"In the U.S., some newspaper sites have allowed themselves to be pushed by big portals into becoming more portal-like," Burton says. "I think they lose their relevance to their users. If you're trying to be a portal, you're trying to be all things to everyone.

"I think that for a while The New York Times fell into that trap," he adds. "Here we've avoided morphing our news sites into a more generalized portal. When people are looking for news, that's what they're interested in. We're narrowing our focus and saying, 'What can we really win in? Then we're getting out of the areas where we can't and specializing."

Toward that end, the Herald's 20 online producers who work in Sydney, and another 20 who work at the Fairfax-owned Melbourne Age newspaper in Melbourne, focus their creative efforts on delivering solid, updated news, including politics, business, sports and lifestyle. [The Herald and the Age share online content.]

"Our big mantra is that we will never lead with what the paper leads on," Burton says. "We should have killed the story in the paper that day. It should be mincemeat by the next day."

Online News Editor Richard Woolveridge is charged with finding fresh stories. He wakes early each morning and checks the wires by 7 a.m. During last summer's political unrest in Fiji, for example, the lead article in the printed edition often focused on the hostage crisis, so Woolveridge awoke seeking further developments.

"With a story like Fiji, there's going to be an update overnight," he says. "That's where the Web can fill in the gap that the paper can't."

Woolveridge often seeks other ways to tell big stories. In the case of Fiji, he constructed slide shows using staff photos that didn't make the paper. He dialed up Herald reporters in Suva, Fiji's capital, and asked for analysis or news, and he included those segments in audio clips.

Burton says producers find roughly 10 stories a day that can use multimedia components. It's an approach reflected in the Herald's Olympics coverage this week.

"What we're finding is really powerful is the use of audio and video," Burton says. "When digital photos come in, we might run them as a slide show and then lay an audio track over it. It's sort of crude but it works."

Burton particularly likes the way audio allows Herald print reporters to contribute to the site.

"The big issue we're dealing with is not turning our print reporters into wire reporters [for the Web]," Burton says.

Print reporters do sometimes write breaking news for the site, but that's not their focus.

"When print reporters contribute, producers are looking for analysis, for their take on a story," he says. "The reporters can go straight to their desks, talk into the phone and record their take. We digitize it and it goes straight up. It's easy to do. It's not a big tech issue.

"The trick now," Burton adds, "is bringing all the text and audio and video together."

Herald editors have long debated just how much content Web users want.

"A couple of years ago we published nearly every (print edition) story online," Burton says. "Now we've come full-circle and said, 'We don't want it all.' "

Online producers place about half of the newspaper's daily content onto the Web these days. Those stories account for about 60 percent of the material on the site. The rest of the online content comes from producers, reporters and the wires.

Some stories, of course, work better than others. Site Editor Stephen Hutcheon says Herald Web readers like technology news, sports and business, but sex always sells the best.

"You put a teaser on there with something a little (risqu?) and it gets hit to high heaven," Hutcheon says.

So do animal stories.

"I'm a big believer in gorilla stories," Hutcheon says, grinning. "We had a Rwandan mountain gorilla in a zoo. We put a photo on our front page and it just went off the planet. It's incredibly low rent, but it seems to work."

Like their colleagues in the U.S., Herald online producers try to strike a balance between popular light stories and the big, hard news of the day.

Burton says the approach has earned the Herald online a 60 percent market reach in Sydney. Within the Herald offices, attitudes about the site have changed dramatically.

When Woolveridge volunteered for an online editor position in 1998, some of his print colleagues simply couldn't believe it.

"A number of people said to me, 'You're kidding. You're going to bury yourself,' " he recalls. "A lot of print journalists thought it was the young upstart and didn't take it seriously."

Not so today. The Web has shrunk distances between people, and that has changed the minds of many who are tired of the tyranny of isolation.

"In the past year," Woolveridge says, "many of those [previously doubtful] reporters have been keen on the Web and have filed stuff voluntarily," he says.

Hail stories, no doubt, are much easier to come by.