(Rich Gordon)

Scott Elliott, a Dayton Daily News education writer and award-winning blogger, recently moved to the paper's editorial board. Because of his blogging experience, Elliott knows deep-down that there have to be ways to rethink the online version of the newspaper editorial page. But he has been frustrated to discover how little innovative thinking there has been in this area.

"I have looked at nearly every major American newspaper's website for ideas for how our online presence ought to be revamped and found them all doing essentially what we are doing, which is just reproducing each day's editorial page online," Elliott wrote me a few weeks ago. "To me, there is something wrong with the fact that the opinion page has gone from being the most interactive part of the newspaper to one of the least interactive parts of our Web site."

Elliott is right, of course. I can think of two astute observers of the digital media transition who would agree with him.

One is David Paul Nord, author of one of my favorite journalism history books, "Communities of Journalism," which traces the newspaper-community connection back to the 17th century. One chapter in the book was originally an essay written in 1991, in which Nord wrote:

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831-32, he was struck by how Americans participated in their journalism, including their newspapers... If Tocqueville could visit the United States today, he would be impressed by our newspapers, pleased by our electronic bulletin boards, but perhaps sometimes surprised and disappointed by the separation between the two. The separation between information and participation - between the professional mass media and the new interpersonal, interactive media - is wide and growing.

Nord's prescient observations (this was written in an era of dial-up online services, years before the World Wide Web) are still worth thinking about in an era when most news sites allow people to comment, when bloggers engage their readers in conversation, and when millions of people are monitoring their Facebook feed more avidly than their email inbox (let alone their voicemail). Even with this great rise in "social media," local news sites are doing a lousy job of cultivating "audience participation." And an even worse job of harnessing that participation to the benefit of journalism and local communities.

Which brings me to the second person I'm thinking about: my friend Steve Yelvington, digital strategist for Morris Communications. Yelvington wrote a great blog post last week about the three roles that local Web sites should play: town crier, town square and town expert. He even illustrated the idea:



Steve wrote:

Journalists tend to gravitate to only one of these roles: the town crier, the quaint colonial-era village character who walks around ringing a bell telling you what's happening. It comes naturally. This is why 24x7 coverage teams and the "continuous news desk" concept take root so quickly when newsrooms suddenly awaken to the urgency of taking the Internet seriously. But the other roles aren't secondary. They're coequal, and they're grossly neglected by most local news websites.

Don't stop with my excerpt. Read the rest of Yelvington's post. He makes a powerful argument for dramatic changes in local news Web sites overall - such as topic pages, aggregation of local voices, more plentiful outbound links and citizen-powered reviews.

What both Nord and Yelvington recognize is that local media shouldn't just be in the business of reporting and conveying facts. They also need to serve as a forum for conversation around local issues. Nord's book argues that the "forum model" has, historically, been as fundamental to the role of American newspapers as their reporting. Yelvington points out that the current usage patterns for online news sites - "great reach (monthly cumulative unique-user count) and terrible frequency" - are strong evidence for fortifying the "town square."

One key challenge is that between the 17th and 20th centuries, the "town square" function at newspapers moved from being a central focus of the publication to a tightly edited page or two, overseen by a small staff. People who launched and ran early newspaper Web sites (me included, when I was the first online director for The Miami Herald) didn't realize how important commentary would become on the Web. So the opinion section remained a sideshow on Web sites dominated by news - while the role of online forum was seized by blogs, social media and startups such as the Huffington Post.

Still, I think there remains an opportunity for local news Web sites to play a central role in supporting conversation about issues important to local communities. And in recent years, the National Conference on Editorial Writers, the organization that represents newspaper editorialists, has been doing some deep thinking on this subject. Eddie Roth, one of the leaders of this effort, is an editorial writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He shared with me several documents that were part of the organization's "Opinion Pool" project, which was subtitled, "Building heavily trafficked, highly trusted online places for informed debate on local public affairs."

The Opinion Pool project was put together with a goal of raising money to support experiments by editorial pages at multiple newspapers - as Roth describes it, "to give a half a dozen or so properties some resources and breathing room to collectively build an online template and develop work routines that draw on the best features and strategies being developed by local editorial pages nationally." The NCEW generated a 2007 grant application to the Knight News Challenge to fund these experiments, but the group didn't win a grant. A 2006 memo from Roth, however, did list some interesting ideas for digital editorial pages, such as:

• Agenda: A calendar of important community discussions and decisions scheduled for the week ahead, itemized and summarized, with commentary;
• Broadsides: Print formatting that displays opinion content in a form "suitable for posting and canvassing in the community";
• Think Tank: A video recording booth where people can record statements for posting on the opinion page Web site;
• Blog-ola: Readers rate and respond to local and national bloggers, "with the most incisive commentary published in the print edition"

In an email interchange this week, Roth listed some examples of editorial pages he thinks are making strides toward building a more interactive opinion section:

• The Dallas Morning News' "deep and mature and highly interactive online opinion presence";
• The Kansas City Star's Midwest Voices;
• His own paper's "heavily trafficked letters blog, in which readers initiate conversations, an editorial page blog on which we post and join in the conversation, as well as a very popular cartoon caption contest"

Still, Roth wrote, "I agree with Scott that no one has put it all together, not in an integrated, sustainable Web 2.0 way." He also noted that opinion-based sites outside the newspaper industry - such as Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast" are among the liveliest, highest quality, most heavily trafficked and best technically developed" journalism Web sites.

The staffs that operate newspaper editorial pages face some daunting challenges. They already have their hands full researching and writing editorials, reading and editing letters to the editor, and producing one or more pages of content every day. In many cases they have little influence over the design of the Web site opinion pages, and the staff responsible for running the Web site may not consider the editorial page a high priority. Beyond that, it's common for editorial pages to be led by senior staff members who may be uncomfortable with new technology, reluctant to change their traditional models or both.

At least one company, Gannett, has recognized that there is a connection between editorial pages and online conversation. The company's "Information Center" initiative, which aims to restructure local newsrooms for the digital age, renames the editorial page as the "community conversation desk." A 2006 memo from Gannett CEO Craig Dubow says this department "extends the concept of the editorial page and manages staff commentary including editorials, blogs and columns. This desk also encourages community participation online, not only in structured forums and comment sections on stories but also in empowering readers to create their own forums for discussion of essential community issues."

I don't have much of a sense of what this change has meant in practice at Gannett papers. But a report I compiled last year for the Newspaper Association of America showed clearly that providing opportunities for users to interact with each other can significantly increase traffic to online news sites. And as I wrote in December, several trends are converging that could create new opportunities to improve online conversations around news.

News Mixer, a demonstration Web site launched in December by a class of Medill master's students, takes advantage of these developments.

News Mixer applies four novel approaches - novel, at least, for news sites - to building engagement through conversations around news. They are:

1. Facebook Connect. This new service allows users to log in to News Mixer using their Facebook ID. When someone posts something on News Mixer, he or she has the option of cross-posting it to Facebook, which potentially generates additional traffic. Every user gets a page where contributions from Facebook friends are aggregated, and it's easy to invite your friends to participate on News Mixer. On the home page, contributions from your friends are highlighted.
2. Quips. This is the most visible new "commenting structure" on News Mixer - IM- or Twitter-like comments - and people really seem to think they're cool.
3. Questions and answers. This feature allows people to ask questions about the content in any individual paragraph in an article - and then lets other users, including the journalist who wrote the article, respond to those questions. As with quips, the idea is to put some structure around the way users comment on the site, in hopes that this will lead to more substantive conversations. I'm particularly intrigued by the idea that this is a way of increasing the engagement between journalists and their readers - and spawning follow-up reporting that the journalist might not otherwise have thought of.
4. The display of letters to the editor. The idea of letters to the editor is, of course, not novel at all. But their treatment on News Mixer is different than on other news sites. The key difference lies in the way News Mixer allows a site manager to designate letters as "editor's picks." Once a letter is chosen as an editor's pick, the site treats it equivalently to an article. So a site visitor will see a feed of articles intermingled with "editor's pick" letters. It's a way of rewarding letter writers who make particularly strong or cogent points.

The software that powers News Mixer is available on an open-source basis. At least two organizations are actively working with the code, and I'm looking forward to seeing it implemented on a production Web site so we can see the impact on user engagement and news-based conversations.

Whatever happens with News Mixer, I'm interested in finding some examples of new thinking applied to opinion sections of local news Web sites. Post links and ideas below!


Note: My wife, Marie Dillon, is an award-winning editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune. This post reflects my views alone.


By Rich Gordon (richgor-at-northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.