By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Time prides itself on providing some of the best Internet coverage in the business--but then, we have an unfair advantage. His name is Philip Elmer-DeWitt, our senior editor for technology, and he was surfing the Net before most of us even knew it existed. Elmer-DeWitt's years of experience navigating through cyberspace have not only put him ahead of the curve on virtually every Internet-related issue but have also made him unusually adept at cutting through the considerable hype and confusion that surround this baffling new medium--a skill that's especially evident in this week's cover story on the controversial topic of electronic pornography.

Writing about computers was not what Elmer-DeWitt had in mind when he arrived at Time in 1979. For one thing, the magazine was not covering the field at the time. For another, he first signed on as a temporary secretary. "Like many people," he recalls, "I decided to be a journalist in the aftermath of the Watergate hearings. I was trying to make it as a freelance writer and was basically starving. I needed a paycheck."

He moved quickly out of the secretarial ranks, though, and into a position as a science researcher. In 1982, when Time launched its new Computers section, Elmer-DeWitt became its first writer. "I'm not sure if it was my writing skill that got me the job, or the fact that I'd done some programming on summer jobs during high school and college."

Whatever the reason, Elmer-DeWitt has proved to be one of Time's most talented and versatile writers, not only making the daunting world of computers and software easy to understand and fun to read about but also turning out lively cover stories (14 before this one) on such topics as human cloning, obesity, genetics and sex in America. He also found time to help establish Time's electronic presence on America Online in 1994.

It was Elmer-DeWitt's reputation for clear and accurate discussions of complex topics that led an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University to offer their study of online porn first to Time. "Like most people on the Net," Elmer-DeWitt says, "I knew this stuff was out there. But I hadn't realized how much of it there was--I had never even heard of most of those '-philias' [sexual preferences]. I am a staunch believer in free speech, but some of what people are looking at is very disturbing." The scientists who conducted the study were convinced that Elmer-DeWitt would be able to put these difficult issues in context. As this week's cover story makes clear, they were right.