April 8, 1999 | In New York City, the revolution arrives by bus. So it was that last month abcnews.com launched a bus-side ad campaign encouraging the city's office drones to log onto its news site on the job. With the tag line "Ready when you are," the campaign, "Newsmakers," is the highest-profile effort to date to seize what online analysts Jupiter Communications call "the new prime time" -- the noon-to-4 p.m. slot.

The campaign's most immediate attention-grabbing aspect was its pitchmen: The ads, also on train platforms, subway-fare cards and coffee cups to target info-hungry straphangers, pair international figures with cute taglines -- for Saddam Hussein, "He's available for dictation at your desk."

Now certainly there's something a bit unseemly about using tyrants and mass murderers as a carrot for viewership. (It's just a shame Pol Pot already kicked it: "Y2K worries? Wait till you hear about his Year Zero problems!") And despite the ass-covering references to checking the site at "lunch" (as if any cubicle jockey has a lunch hour anymore), one has to wonder just how open Michael Eisner is to his own serfs' on-the-clock browsing. "We didn't think that it was our place to judge what companies' policies should be," said abcnews.com vice president and general manager Katherine Dillon, adding that the site's hits generally peak around lunchtime and that, at least in the news division, worktime surfing is "integral" to the job.

But the real coup of what Advertising Age called ABC's "guerrilla" campaign (which Dillon said should break nationwide later in the year) is that it announces a new theater in the infotainment wars. Pop quiz: Where are you reading this column? In the family room, huddled around the monitor, arm around your spouse, kids snuggled into their jammies, enjoying warm cups of cocoa as you explore this new medium together like families around the crystal sets of old?

Yeah, right. You're probably chained to your office monitor, checking out this site as a backup diversion after running out of ideas for thumbtack-and-pink-eraser animal sculptures. As any online writer who reads his reader e-mail can tell you, the inflow of response more or less maps the daily schedule of the white-collar work force. Beep! It's coffee break on the West Coast. Beep! Lunchtime, CST. Online moguls and IPO candidates may talk convergence and streaming video and the death of the dinosaur media, but those of us working online know our real competition is not "ER" or Imus, but rather the third-quarter projections spreadsheet due on your boss's desk by 3 p.m.

It's a battle we're happy to fight, judging by the full-page newspaper ads whipped up this week to tout the 24-hour Kosovo coverage at MSNBC.com and nytimes.com, presumably to draw work-time surfers. If the majority of America's disposable income is spending most of its time atrophying in its ergonomic chairs, who needs to conquer the living room? Who needs the box office when you can have, well, the office?

While everyone else fights it out for America's meager leisure time, the Web is the art and info forum best suited to the most important space in contemporary life: the workplace. Can it be long before Fox starts producing cigarette-break-length sitcoms especially for office consumption? Until we see ad-sponsored online videoconferencing, the better to tuck in your kids from your desk at 10 p.m.? Already, ABC's striking an interesting deal with the overcommitted American: Not home in time to catch "World News Tonight"? Suit yourself; we'll bring Peter Jennings to you.

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