Like a gardener with room to grow but a shortage of plants, Features Editor Sherri Gardner-Howell had an open niche in her lifestyle section but not enough stories to fill it. Readers of The Knoxville News-Sentinel would gobble up a home and garden page, she knew, but her staff was already working to capacity. Producing the new section was next to impossible.

Then, in 1997, Scripps Howard News Service began offering the first of its paginated feature fronts: eye-catching Home & Garden pages with copy, graphics and photos wrapped in colorful, state-of-the-art designs. Ms. Gardner-Howell jumped at the opportunity to "expand" her department by making use of the showy new product offered at no cost to Scripps newspapers.

"It looked to us like a different way to do a section without having to add staff," she said. "There would be weeks when we would be able to free our writers and come up with something local. But without stressing us out too much, we could have a weekly section by counting on the paginated front."

The home and garden section did more than blossom. It proved so popular that The News-Sentinel added other paginated materials from SHNS as they became available. And last September the paper's business section began running SHNS's weekly paginated page on personal finance and career strategies as well.

"The pages enabled The News-Sentinel to add a business section on Mondays, which means we now provide business news sections to our readers seven days a week,'' said Deputy Managing Editor Georgiana Vines. "This helps us fulfill our mission to be the No. 1 source for business news in East Tennessee."

Paginated fronts are just one aspect of the new Scripps Howard News Service. The Scripps institution that began during World War I has practically re-invented itself in the '90s. Under the guidance of Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland, SHNS has worked to become more responsive, visual, probing and prolific. From the seven different paginated fronts to in-depth analysis of national topics to timely features for "story-hungry" lifestyle editors, SHNS is striving to provide Scripps' 19 daily newspapers with stories they can't get anywhere else.

"We're trying to make SHNS more valuable in every sense of the word," Copeland said recently. "Journalistically, we want to make it better. We want stories that are relevant and interesting to our papers, stories they can't get from the other wires. I wake up every day thinking, 'How can I help our papers?'''

The Washington office also is working directly with HGTV, the Food Network and many Scripps Web sites. For example, HGTV on-air hosts have become newspaper columnists, and the bureau provides a custom news feed to HGTV.com.

"We are the information hub of the company - synergy central - and we can add value to everyone's work by sharing it," Copeland said. "We take material from TV and put it into print, and then take print material and put it on the Web. We are giving new life to all the good work Scripps produces."

Beyond its mission to serve Scripps newspapers, the news service also has taken strides in the direction financial self-sufficiency, a long-term goal. The 400 subscribers to SHNS - including heavyweights like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the San Jose Mercury-News - have a combined circulation of 25 million, and SHNS has grown to become the nation's second largest supplementary news service behind the Associated Press.

But Copeland doesn't wants the Scripps wire be anything like AP.

"I tell editors that if they're reading the same story on the AP, then we're not doing the job,'' Copeland said. "We still cover the big stories, but we try to do it in a different way. We're experimenting with new ways of telling stories.''

During the war in Kosovo, for example, SHNS offered information in a variety of packages: question-and-answer pieces, analyses, profiles of the key players, explanations of weapon systems and strategies, all with graphs, maps, photos and charts.

Gone are the days of routine coverage of Washington and its minutiae and meetings. SHNS reporters are now covering beats with broader interest, including health, science, religion and sports.

"Whenever we do a story about something the government is doing or something in the economy, we try to write from the perspective of readers of our papers," Copeland said. "When I'm looking at a story, I'm thinking of a mother who is getting her kids ready for school and the TV's on and the paper's open and there are two bowls of Cheerios on the table. That's the person I'm trying to reach. And we're not going to do it with a 20-part series on Medicare reform.

"But we would do it with a story about, if you are on Medicare, how you can buy cheaper medicines. Or what is a good nutritious school lunch to pack? Or are your kids going to be able to say prayers in school? Or how safe is the car in which you're going to take them to school?"

In a recent one-week stretch in October, SHNS offered news enterprise stories on topics such as:

• SENIOR CITIZEN PRISONERS. In the leafy highlands of souhwestern Pennsylvania is an old folks' home for killers, rapists and armed robbers, with gleaming floors, freshly painted walls and big windows offering panoramic views.

• GROCERY CARDS. Supermarket club cards offer steep discounts to customers in return for customers letting stores build detailed personal profiles, but some people aren't buying.

• CYBERWAR. Secretly, silently during the war over Kosovo, the United States engaged in offensive cyber combat, an occurrence that matches in significance the first use of aerial bombs. America now has catapulted into an era of extraordinary promise and peril that could forever alter the ways of war, but without any rules to guide it.

• 21st CENTURY INVENTIONS. Very soon in the next millennium new inventions are coming, so strange, so powerful, so transcendental as to confound all understanding of what is natural and what is not, and what it actually means to be human and to be alive.

And for those who always wondered where those Secret Service agents came from, the SHNS schedule included this interesting item in its story budget: "To work in the Secret Service, you must be physically fit, college-educated, between the ages of 21 and 37 and look good in Ray-bans."

SHNS also has revamped its campaign coverage. "In the past we'd identify 10 big issues and we'd talk to all the candidates and we'd write these long boring stories," Copeland said. "This year we're doing 10 paginated pages on different issues that have all the same information but in a much more accessible and readable form. We did guns and crime, for example. Instead of just asking the candidates for a big essay that would be a lot of empty words, we asked each candidate what gun they owned. And had they ever been arrested? We got great answers. And of the 12 candidates, all have owned guns, except for Mrs. Dole."

Copeland also has stepped up efforts for collaboration among Scripps newspapers. In one recent example, Copeland asked editors to explore the issue of prayer and football in their communities. "Nine papers sent in materials: photos, stories, quotes," Copeland said. "David Nielsen, one of our sports writers, put together a fantastic package. Because of Scripps' reach, we had a national look at a really interesting issue. In addition, each of the papers that did the work had enough material to localize the story or write a really good local sidebar. To me, that's the bureau working at its best. That way we can take advantage of being a group of newspapers instead of just being individual papers."

In other developments, SHNS has dramatically increased the number of photos it distributes, from 100 a month a few years ago to 400 to 500 a month now. The news service has begun streaming the entire wire into some Web sites, and it is turning the paginated pages into Web products. "To me this is an exciting time to be a journalist, because the future is wide open," Copeland said. That future, he noted, includes "Web sites and media yet to be discovered."

Editors in all departments have noticed the increasing breadth, visual appeal and human-interest value of SHNS stories. Said Mike Bass, sports editor at The Cincinnati Post: "At a time of downsizing personnel and budgets, of new minor leagues and teams, of increasing emphasis on local sports during the Internet age, SHNS is critical for national coverage. As an afternoon paper in a two-paper market, we especially need something different than the AP stories in the morning competition."

Said Ms. Gardner-Howell: "In the past few years the number and quality of stories seems to have increased as well as the ones that now move with art ­ a features editor's favorite two words. I see what is available out there in the soft news or features selection, and SHNS does a better job than anyone - including AP and New York Times News Service.''

The SHNS wire also can be a source of inspiration for writers, whose best work is likely to show up in newspapers across the country. "People in our company are doing world-class work that's now being displayed in many more papers than our own," Copeland said.

Increased communication and collaboration are two of Copeland's primary goals for 2000. He wants to see the Scripps newspapers work as a team more frequently, and he wants more feedback from editors and writers. "I consider the editors of our papers to be the board of directors of the news service," Copeland said. "It's their news service. And I look to them."

Cindy Starr is a reporter at The Cincinnati Post.