When I was a cub reporter and covered congressional elections at Newsday in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of my colleagues and I joked that the newspaper’s editorial endorsement of political candidates was “the kiss of death.”

No matter whom the editorial board decided to endorse, the voters always seemed to elect the other guy.

Right about now, newspapers across the country are working to bestow their editorial kiss on candidates for offices from school board to senator. Editorial boards — distinct and separate from the newsroom, able to inject the opinion banned in the rest of the paper — conduct interviews with candidates and determine with the publisher and sometimes the owner who get the paper’s thumbs up.

But what’s to become of the newspaper endorsement in the age of the Internet, when anyone can be a publisher and when a popular e-mail or Web site can reach more eyeballs than many dailies? I set out to find an answer.

Editorial endorsements loom like a lightning rod above the world of journalism, attracting reader accusations of political bias throughout the newspaper. Picking candidates has long been a controversial practice in the industry. “Don’t let anyone tell you how to mark your ballot,” wrote Allen H. Neuharth, founder of USA Today, which doesn’t make endorsements, in a column two years ago. “Many newspaper editors and owners still cling to the old-fashioned idea that they know better than you how you should vote.”

Research suggests that newspaper endorsements have only a slight impact on election results. From 1940 to 2002, newspaper endorsements changed perhaps 1 percentage point of the vote, according to a 2004 study by Steve Ansolabehere, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former dean of and now a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the issue over time and found that “the more visible the race, the less impact the endorsement has.” That means an endorsement for, say, state comptroller might sway more votes than one for a highly visible Senate race, where voters have many sources of information.

Ansolabehere found that editorial boards have been making more endorsements of more candidates in recent years. At many papers, the practice is seen as a necessary rite. “I think it’s one of our most important responsibilities,” Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, wrote in a column last month.

Ann Brown, editorial page editor of the Arizona Daily Star, said endorsements offer voters a deeper, analytical view of the election. “We feel that we have spent hours and hours talking to these candidates and researching the issues,” she said. “This is something that the readers don’t get to do. When we give our opinion in the general election, I think we’re sharing some of our unique insight.”

These days, however, newspaper readership is dropping, and increasing numbers of voters are going online for more of their news. On many newspaper Web sites, it’s easy to miss the editorial page entirely, endorsements and all. Readers may be more likely to hear about endorsements from blogs or candidates’ TV ads.

“Think back to the Howard Dean scream,” said Michael Cornfield, an adjunct professor at George Washington University, referring to Dean’s infamous, high-decibel reaction after losing the 2004 Iowa caucuses. “There may be an MP3 file that swings more opinion in a race than a newspaper endorsement. And what’s had more influence on the Virginia Senate race this year than the ‘macaca’ video?” Certainly not endorsements or even the commercial spots that the incumbent, Republican George Allen, bought after his racial slur was caught on video and posted on YouTube.com.

Today, some newspapers understand the impact of the new media on political endorsements. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is now posting audio recordings of its editorial board interviews on its Web site, www.cleveland.com/open. Voters can hear GOP Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio boasting to the board about how he’s learned “to work with Democrats and Republicans to make things happen.” His opponent, Rep. Sherrod Brown, talks about how “our state has lost 200,000 jobs since Mike and George Bush were sworn in January of 2001.”

This year the San Francisco Chronicle changed its editorial format. Standard interviews with candidates have been replaced by debates streamed on its broadcast partner’s Web site, www.cbs5.com. The first, on Oct. 5, was between California’s attorney general candidates, Republican State Sen. Chuck Poochigian and the always-colorful Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a Democrat. “It’s a mystery to a lot of readers,” editorial page editor John Diaz said of the endorsement process. “My thought was to put this on public display.”

Maybe letting voters see more of the process will help them understand why an endorsement was made. The local newspaper’s endorsements still could be the kiss of death in some places. But at least readers may not just kiss off the whole idea.

Contributing editor Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.