We've taken our first steps toward the "Newsroom of the Future."

At 6 a.m. on Jan. 29 we launched our Breaking News initiative and it was a success - not necessarily because we reported important news (our first post was a weather alert at 6:05 a.m.), but because we signaled a change in direction for the newsroom. The Spokesman-Review is no longer a newspaper, but an information company that publishes news and information whenever and however people want it.

Although we've been publishing stories on our Web site for several years, this initiative is noteworthy because we are intentionally reporting and editing news for spokesmanreview.com - as opposed to posting stories online that were originally conceived and written for the newspaper.

As part of this initiative (first detailed in the "Newsroom of the Future" report), we've devoted a reporter and editor to the Web site full time, starting at 6 a.m. every week day - a full three hours earlier than we previously started most of our shifts.

The bulk of our 'breaking news coverage' will come between the hours of 6 a.m. and noon when our online audience is at its peak, although we will continue to post stories on the site throughout the day and evening as they occur.

Eventually, we hope to add a second breaking new reporter to cover the afternoon and early-evening news cycle, and then expand into weekend coverage.

Breaking News Reporter Amy Cannata's first day went like this: she posted a 'drive-time' weather alert at 6:05 a.m., followed by a traffic update at 6:15 a.m. At 6:30 a.m., the police department's public information officer called her about an alleged assault. At 6:45 a.m., Amy headed out to the scene and for the next hour or so called in additional details to Nancy Malone, our newly named Assistant City Editor for Multimedia. Amy wrapped up coverage of that event by taking a photo with her cell phone, which we later posted on our site.

By the middle of last week, we not only were reporting breaking news, we were beating TV at their own game: we had a story about a man who was hit by a train up on our Web site before any of the local stations had anything on their morning news programs.

I suspect after another month or so of training, Amy will be able to function as a truly Mobile Reporter or "MoJo" - able to report stories and shoot and edit video from the field, without ever having to come into the office.

And what's the value of all that high-tech wizardry? Immediacy. In this era of 24/7 news and information, the newspaper's future rests on its ability to tell people what they want to know whenever they want to know it - via the Web and newspaper, via e-mail and cell phone alerts, perhaps one day via a Web-based broadcast out of our newsroom.

The goal of editors will be to improve the quality of online journalism while not diminishing our award-winning print journalism. Newspapers across the country are seeking to strike the same balance.

In fact, last week Seattle Times Executive Editor David Boardman announced a restructuring of newsroom leadership and coverage there to better integrate print and online. He apparently referred to the changes as the "path to transformation."

Here in Spokane, we'll work to make sure our print journalism contains all its customary context, analysis and expertise, while our online journalism provides immediate information that is regularly refreshed.

Citizens and news-watchers should be well-served by this initiative. Let us know how you think we're doing.

What will the future be for newspapers? How do we get there? And what practical changes can we make as soon as tomorrow?

Those were the questions that led to The Spokesman-Review's "Newsroom of the Future" project, a three-month examination into the present and future of American newspaper journalism.

A lot of journalists are in the business of prognosticating these days, and you can now add my name to the list with the completion of this report, which was delivered to editors today.

You can download the report at: 147 Kb PDF

Will newspapers survive? Yes, but there likely will be fewer of them and they'll look much different than they do today. They may not publish every day and they'll contain mostly context and analysis. All the world's breaking news will be online.

Elements you're used to seeing - sports agate and stock listings, for instance - will all be online. Comic strips may even become animated.

Some newspapers will go completely to the Web, eliminating paper and ink and a costly and outdated delivery system. Others will have Web sites so deep and rich with content that the actual newspaper will be the niche supplement, and not the other way around.

Multimedia will be everywhere. Videos, slide shows, podcasts, vodcasts. There will come a time when you won't be able to distinguish a print reporter from a TV reporter by the equipment they carry; they'll both be lugging around videocameras.

There may even come a time when your computer will sense your boredom with a story and remove it from your screen before you finish reading it.

The next 10 years will bring profound changes to the newspaper industry, not only because of new technology but because of the changing way we communicate.

As Time magazine noted in its Person of the Year coverage: You, me, average citizens everywhere - we all control the Information Age.

For newspapers that means a seismic shift in the way we interact with our readers. Whether newspapers survive on paper or migrate toward electronic ink, our relationship with readers will have to change. The popularity of citizen-generated content - and the ease of producing it -means that citizens will no longer allow newspapers to stand above their communities; we'll have to work from within them. We will have to see readers as information partners.

That, then, is the ultimate prediction from this report: The Newsroom of the Future will be interactive. And everything we do from here on out - from adding video to niche publications to continuous breaking news desks to foreign-language Web sites - will all be done in the name of relationship-building AND journalism. We will not 'do technology' because it's there; we will do it because it makes better journalism.

I honestly can't think of a better time to be a journalist than right now, despite all the "sky is falling" manifestos that say YouTube and Craigslist will eat our lunch and drive us out of business.

I commend Spokesman-Review editors for deciding to embrace the uncertainty of our times rather than fear it. When Editor Steve Smith asked me in the fall of 2006 to step away from my regular job as senior editor for local news to go on a three-month fact-finding mission, it was with the charge that I return with some proposals for how we might adapt our workflow and culture. You'll find those proposals in this report.

There are a variety of recommendations, from restructuring our assignment desk to building Web sites that showcase citizen content. The bulk of the report focuses on how to change from a print-centric culture to a multiplatform culture where we deliver news and information whenever and however people want it.

The good news is that - after three months, three cross-country trips and dozens of interviews - The Spokesman-Review is looking pretty good. We're farther along than many papers and not too far behind the rest. We have a rich history of engagement with readers; we have reporting and editing expertise; we have an award-winning Web site of original content; we have a culture that supports creativity and we have a willingness to improve our craft.

I predict some profound changes in the way we do our work this year, but I also predict it will be to the good for readers.

When we started this project in September, we knew we wanted it to be interactive, which is how this self-described technology curmudgeon ended up writing a blog in the first place. We've heard from readers and people within the newspaper industry. The feedback has been welcome. We'll keep the blog running as we implement some of these proposals.

This Newsroom of the Future report is not really meant to be a prescription for The Spokesman-Review or any other newspaper. The true value of the report rests in the questions it raises; the success of the project will be determined by our collective ability to keep a conversation about innovation going.

I took some time off in November after my last trip to The Washington Post, the J-Lab at The University of Maryland, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and the Media Lab at MIT.

I'm now back in the office and faced with the enormous task of writing a final report that includes some proposals for changes we might want to consider for the news operation of The Spokesman-Review.

Although I've been blogging steadily (and can certainly steal liberally from all that writing), I haven't had much time to work on the actual final report. I suspect that parts of it will be effortless to piece together; other sections might not be because there is so much information to dissect.

As I've said from the beginning of this journey: there is no single correct answer. Each newsroom must make its own way based on its own news values, the tolerance of its readership, the tolerance of its ownership, and perhaps...its own sense of fearlessness.

Therefore, extracting a proposal for The Spokesman-Review from among all the wonderful ideas and theories I've experienced is not as easy as it sounds. And that's really only one part of the process. There is still hundreds of hours of conversation to be had internally with editors and reporters who have their own ideas to propose and, undoubtedly, dozens of questions.

(And if I've learned anything from this project, there is still plenty of conversation to be had with our readers. Newspapers haven't done nearly as much listening as we should have.)

While I set about the task of writing, I'm more or less back to my regular job as senior editor for local news. In a practical sense that means back to meetings, story editing, personnel decisions, strategic planning, speaking engagements _ all the everyday things that make this job so thrilling, but also make it difficult to find 'extra' time for anything else.

This week alone I'm presenting some initial thoughts from this project to newsroom managers during our annual planning retreat. I'm also talking about the future of newspapers with the Washington Ag Forestry Leadership group, which always conducts an annual media seminar.

And I've just been asked to talk about my project with editors of The Oregonian, which is embarking on a project about newsroom management and change.

The good news is that the future of newspapers seems to be THE topic these days, not just in newsrooms but in other quadrants of society as well. That makes the debate about these issues, and any changes that might result, much easier to have.

When I first started this project in September, I felt alone. I knew other papers were wrestling with change, but I wasn't aware of a similar research project that involved so much travel and interview time. Three months later, I'm happy to report that the newspaper industry IS actively considering its future, and while the S-R has been fairly unique in putting together this professional walkabout, others ARE asking similar questions and working on similar proposals.

This is clearly a really exciting time to be in journalism.

Stay tuned.

The following wins the "missed opportunity" prize.

Jack Driscoll, the Editor-in-Residence of MIT's Media Lab, told me that during the 90s several big-name newspapers were part of a "News In The Future" consortium along with MIT.

Driscoll remembers it as a "pretty lusty group." Gannett was at the table, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. The goal of the consortium was to support future innovation - to prepare the industry for the very moment we are in. But economic pressures and what Driscoll calls "complacency" changed the group's focus.

NiF morphed into a group called "Organizing Ideas" and then into one called "Simplicity." It's possible that another publisher group like News In The Future might emerge again, says Driscoll. "It kind of depends on sponsor needs."

But it was during the existence of the NiF group that MIT researchers developed the technology for E-ink. The idea, unfortunately, seemed "too far off" for newspapers so we went back to what we knew - ink on paper.

Today, Sony offers a Portable Reader System that "boasts the world's first consumer application of Electronic ink...that delivers a realistic print look that rivals traditional paper," according to Global Traveler magazine. For $350, you can read high-resolution print and graphics on a device the size of a paperback book.

Where would newspapers be today if we'd stayed the course?

At the time, Driscoll says, newspapers were in the mode of buying technological know-how and were content to wait until technology was created.

"Newspapers aren't innovators," Driscoll says. "If it does work, we'll just buy it. They let the opportunity slip."

Driscoll came to his job at MIT through the Boston Globe. The paper was one of the consortium sponsors. He was editor when The New York Times bought the Globe and is candid about the aftermath. "It was clear the Globe was going to be managed by a bookkeeper in New York," Driscoll says. "The quality of their own product remains, but not necessarily their holdings."

The Media Lab offered him a full-time job in 1995 after years of helping MIT students write their thesis papers. He now does community outreach and education on behalf of the lab and writes three blogs: one for sponsors, one for Media Lab staff and faculty, and one for the faculty of both MIT and Cal-Tech, who together are researching election reform issues. The blogs aggregate the best work of thinkers and researchers on various issues.

Driscoll was also an early adopter of citizen media. In 1996 he helped create the SilverStringers, a group of mostly senior citizens who write for the Melrose Mirror, an online magazine. The Media Lab partners with the Melrose group, which has become a sounding board for various projects. Researchers and students frequently visit, present their projects and, according to Driscoll, "get unadulterated feedback."

Driscoll also went on to help develop Rye Reflections, another online site based in Rye, N.H.

Recently, Driscoll teamed up with Media Lab composer Tod Machover (see previous post) on a "hyperscore" project for seriously ill hospital patients. Through computer technology, patients are able to draw lines on a computer screen which are then converted to music. At the culmination of the project, a symphony played several of the patients' musical scores.

Machover has taken the theory of 'healing music' another step, Driscoll says. Yes, music heals, but if you make music yourself it can be more healing to you.

I asked Driscoll and researcher Barbara Barry (see previous post) about the future of traditional newspapers. They both said that papers are part of a continuum - from Revolutionary War pamphleteers to the home-delivered papers we know today.

"I wouldn't be in favor of preserving papers just to preserve them," says Barry. But the need to be informed isn't going to go away. It'll be more important."

Barry cautions that "media inventions" like RSS feeds and multimedia video and audio technology aren't necessarily the answer to improving newspapers or replacing them. She's also not sure we're quite yet at the point of being an Internet Nation. There IS a cult (her word) of content creation going on - podcasters, bloggers - but she doesn't know how widespread the culture really is, or if they're just serving their own interests. For the majority then, papers are still a vital source of information and we still have an opportunity to improve our service and delivery.

Interest in technology IS curving up, Barry says, but will it "create community" in the way papers have traditionally inspired civic engagement? She doesn't know. Predicting beyond 20 years, Driscoll says, is inexact.

Disclaimer: There's no way to blog about my visit to the Media Lab at MIT without sounding stupid and self-deprecating. These people are so out-there and brilliant it's almost scary.

So what can I possibly tell you that doesn't sound shallow? I certainly cannot begin to draw conclusions about what it all means, in many respects because researchers themselves don't yet know.

What I can do is use my powers of observation and explanation to give you a sense of what I saw today.

Before I arrived I assumed that researchers would 'think' in offices and 'experiment in labs somewhere else, but this is an integrated environment. The entire space is a lab organized by areas of study: Artificial Intelligence in one area, Speech Interface and Object-based Media in another. There are wall displays on "Smart City Cars in the 21st Century" and "Independent Wheel Robots," and labs with names such as "Mastercard Future of Transactions."

Music and technology intersect in the "Opera of the Future Lab," in which composer Tod Machover is studying how "musical composition, performance, learning and expression can be facilitated for professionals and amateurs through the design of new interfaces."

This is not your father's iPod.

As Machover was walking past me, I heard him ask, "Have the bows come back from the Royal Academy yet?" Inside his lab, and many others, there is a weird juxtaposition between everyday objects and futuristic gizmos.

For instance, there was an ordinary bass drum sitting next to a tower of computer monitors in the Opera Lab. And next to that was a contraption that looked like a loom, but was actually an instrument of tubing, metal and string. Attached at one end was something I actually recognized: a keyboard.

In the robot pod, worn and rumpled teddy bears were propped nearby metal, multi-colored whirligigs. Outside in the hallway was a very old-school Karate Champ video arcade machine. A sign outside the Robot Lab says researchers are "building cooperative machines that work and learn in partnership with people."

(I don't know about you, but I could use a computer that actually works in cooperation with me!)

So what does it all mean?

For a little history and context (Old Media skills that are surely still in vogue), I turned to Jack Driscoll, and old newspaper guy (former editor of The Boston Globe) who is now the Media Lab's Editor-in-Residence.

And thankfully, every time a researcher said something I didn't understand (which was often), Driscoll would translate. And the entire time he's translating, I'm thinking: there's nothing better than a journalist to spell things out in black and white!

He introduced me to two brilliant, brilliant people: Barbara Barry, a postdoctoral associate at the Media Lab working on camera and video technology, and Hugo Liu, another postdoctoral associate researching common sense computing.

This is the point in the blog where I'm tempted to link you to their Web sites and call it a day, but I'll attempt to be Jack Driscoll and give it my best shot.

Here's something to ponder:

It won't be long before we elect a president who has been blogging his or her entire life. Is such a person even electable, presuming he or she told the world everything about their most personal thoughts?

Or this.

Kids will one day be able to Google their parents (in some cases it's already happening).

Will anything be private anymore?

That's just one of dozens of mind-bending questions being considered by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

I spent time today with Berkman's managing director, Colin Maclay, who offered some questions for Big Media to collectively ponder.

Maclay is not a lawyer, he's "a policy guy" who studies international development and information technology. He spends a considerable amount of time in India.

In case you think this digital explosion is a uniquely American thing, think again: cell-phone use in India has exploded. Their version of American Idol generates 50-60 million SMS votes every week.

The world wants to interact, says Maclay, and that is both a blessing and a curse for newspapers.

We started our far-ranging conversation with his explanation for why everyone suddenly wants to talk, to publish, to make video, to blog.

Historically we've always been creative people; we created alphabets and language and music. We invented the printing press and the home movie camera and on and on. But the barriers to entry have been steep. You couldn't just go out and publish a book. And why mess around with making Super 8 movies when you could just take a still photograph?

There's a period for each media when people shift from doing their own thing to allowing technology to do it for them. But now technology has caught up with our creativity and the barriers have dropped. Maclay says we've entered into a state of "do-it-yourselfness" where we strive to create meaning.

And what that means is that we can now use the ease of the Internet to 'publish' our blogs or missives, we can produce our own record albums with an iPod, we can shoot our own movies and we can distribute them on YouTube.

The result is a massive shift in engagement, the end point of which Maclay is not certain, although futurists are already pondering it.

With such a pipeline of information inundating us, won't consumers still need gatekeepers to sort it all out? Won't there still be a need for reporters and editors to analyize, assemble and rank information?

Gatekeepers, yes. But who or what will be a gatekeeper? Maybe it'll be a robot who can sense our emotions or comprehension. Maybe it'll be a blogger, whose opinion you trust more than any other. Maybe it'll be newspapers.

The challege for us, says Maclay, is to break through with our message.

The concept of Mass Media is dead. It's now more of a meritocracy, but Maclay believes we can hold our own.

"You've earned it," he says. But to thrive, we've got to learn to play well with others, show some humility and leverage our muscle: access, influence and investigative prowess.

The world may be blogging, but no institution is better at holding people to acccount than newspapers. In fact, Maclay says: "There is genuine fear within citizen-media, the citizen journalism community that we could lose mainstream media, that it's going to get downsized even further because of these financial pressures, and the one thing it can do that bloggers can't do, at least so far, is investigative reporting."

So people want newspapers to survive, but that's not enough. Maclay says we have to genuinely want to collaborate with people in a networked way, not because it's good for business, but because it's good for society.

We need to genuinely look for ways to bring citizen voices into our pages (citizen-generated content is just another form of letters-to-the-editor, he says), to be transparent in our decisionmaking, and to quickly admit and correct mistakes.

One of the reasons blogging has caught on, Maclay says, is the belief that the Internet is self-correcting and Mass Media is not. Also, the interaction and transparency of the Web makes it easier for people to figure out bias. The objectivity and balance of newspapers actually throws some people off, he says.

Who knew.

And one more thing: we shouldn't "just do multimedia" because everyone else is doing it.

Maclay threw a zinger when he said that most newspaper Web sites are embarrassing because we're like old dogs trying to learn new tricks. Our traditional culture is pretty obvious when we try to be hip, now and wow.

Ouch.

Instead, we should integrate multimedia into our journalism where it makes sense, as it serves our mission of civic engagement. "Use it to advance what you want to advance. Each media comes to this new world with its resources and its baggage. You need to leverage your resources and not be afraid to let go of baggage."

"Media needs to preserve its sacred ground as convener, a neutral party to facilitate debate," says Maclay, who reads two or three newspapers a day because he "likes the experience."

"All the things that made you what you are, you still have it. How can technology reflect the cultural shift and enable it, so it's empowerment? That's the question," he says.

I'm in Cambridge, Mass., today and tomorrow to talk about the way we live with computers and what we can expect in the way of future technology.

First to Harvard and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and then on to MIT and the Media Lab.

Stay tuned. I hope we'll be able to talk about the implications of technology on the newspaper industry and society.

So how did The Washington Post end up playing the Bush trip to Vietnam and the gay marriage proposal in South Africa in Wednesday's paper.

Both stories ended up inside the A-section. The Bush story ran on page A12; the South Africa story on page A15.

You'll recall from yesterday's blog post that print editors thought the Vietnam story was more timely and relevant than the gay marriage story and ought to get better play on washingtonpost.com. During a noon meeting Tuesday, there was some feeling that the paper would end up giving the Vietnam story pretty good visibility in today's paper.

So what happened?

News.

A1 of today's Washington Post carries the following stories: Sen. Reid pledging to press Bush on an Iraq policy; the kidnapping of dozens in Iraq; Christian groups condemning gay sex; approval of a D.C. stadium parking plan; a story about amateur videos out of Malaysia, and the main centerpiece - a feature about a lame-duck Texas lawmaker who will serve less than a month in Congress due to a technicality.

If you're counting, that's 6 stories on the front of The Washington Post, plus 3 photos, and an index box.

As a matter of comparison (for what it's worth), The Spokesman-Review usually runs 4 or 5 stories on A1 plus an index rail down the left side.

The first sign that washingtonpost.com is different is the view. The online newsroom of 65 is housed on the 12th floor of a Virginia skyscraper with a panoramic view of D.C. and beyond into Maryland. The modern, industrial-looking office of glass, blond wood, monitors and miles and miles of cable is bathed in natural light.

But as is the nature of natural light and computer screens, many of the blinds are drawn.

Wouldn't you want to see the Washington Monument and the dome of the U.S. Capitol if you could?

Several departments operate out of this sleek newsroom: the 'home page team' that edits and produces the 'face' of washingtonpost.com; the multimedia department, which edits all the video for the Web site and partner TV stations; and Live Online, the department that runs more than 60 hours of live chat every week.

Washingtonpost.com employs a total of 250, which is bigger than many newsrooms I've visited!

For almost two years now, washingtonpost.com has been operating two home pages: one that focuses on national news and one on local news. What you get depends on zip code. Readers in Spokane who go to washingtonpost.com get the national version.

A news desk of editors and producers is responsible for those home pages. Topical section editors (politics, business, foreign and national news, etc.,) manage the rest of the site's content.

The news desk is literally staffed 24-hours-per-day. The horseshoe-shaped desk faces out onto two banks of TVs that carry CNN, Fox, MSNBC, local D.C. news stations and White House feeds. Special computer screens at each work station rotate through a dozen Web sites from around the world every 10 seconds: MSNBC, FOX, the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, The Drudge Report.

When editors are trying to decide how to play wire stories on the site, they're actually choosing from among their own national and foreign correspondents. This is not Spokane, where wire often plays second-fiddle to local news.

The washingtonpost.com news desk has a counterpart in the downtown D.C. office. It's called the continuous news desk and is staffed by editors and general assignment print reporters. The continuous news desk, called the CND, is the bridge between the online and print worlds. Editors from the two offices are on the phone throughout the day, talking about what stories to elevate on the site, what local stories are in the works, and where they'll play in the next morning's paper.

In this world, the Web is king.

Jan Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland, says journalists have to change the way we do business if we're to remain relevant.

I spent nearly two hours Monday with Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Since leaving newspapers in 1994, she has become a leader in the journalism reform movement, first through the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and now through the J-Lab.

Through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the J-Lab administers the pioneering New Voices program, which gives seed money to innovative community news ventures in the United States. Through 2008, New Voices will help fund the start-up of 40 micro-local news projects with $12,000 grants; support them with an educational Web site, and help foster their sustainability through $5,000 second-year matching grants.

Among the projects already funded is one I mentioned in a previous post: The Forum, an incredibly rich Web site that uses citizen-writers to cover community issues and politics.

New Voices recipients for 2006 include:

Western Breeze: Montana's Rural News Network, from the University of Montana School of Journalism in Missoula. The network will recruit and train residents of three rural Montana towns to report on news and information for rural Web sites and plans to locate a computer kiosk in each community to ensure access and the ability to contribute to the news.

Monroe County Radio Project, from West Virginia University in Morgantown. The project will create a news operation at WHFI-FM, a radio station licensed to the Monroe County School Board. Journalism students and faculty will train student and adult volunteer reporters to report and produce local news stories for a 15-minute daily newscast, regular monthly public affairs programming and a Web site with news and streaming audio.

Creating Community Conversations, from Columbia College Chicago. This project plans to recruit and train neighborhood journalists to cover five ZIP codes in central Chicago. Columbia journalism students and citizen journalists will cover the local police district, school council, neighborhood groups, church events and businesses. Content will be edited by staff at a new citizen media start-up, Chi-town Daily News.

(The J-Lab also awards the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations, funded by the Knight Foundation. The S-R was among this year's winners for our Transparent Newsroom initiative.)

Schaffer and I clearly had a lot to talk about, but we narrowed it to three general questions: 1) What is citizen media? 2) Where did it come from? And 3), What do newspapers do about it?

That's the headline on a story in Sunday's Washington Post about the fallout from the midterm elections. The story is packaged with several others - traditionally long, narrative pieces on Karl Rove holding steadfast in the face of criticism, and one on Democrats looking for lessons in the GOPs mistakes and successes.

But what's interesting about the 'Questions That Defined the Election' story is the way it's packaged: it's essentially a short promotion in the newspaper to a much larger project on the Web site called Bellwethers: The Battle for Congress.

The story in the paper carries a brief explanation about a project that started in July when the political staff of The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com devised a list of eight questions that would frame the campaign. Some of the questions were about "long-term ideological and geographic trends" and others were about specific 2006 issues. Since July, individual stories (see bellwether link) looked at races where the key questions were "most vividly on display."

At the time each of those individual stories ran in the newspaper, I'm certain they were what you'd expect from The Washington Post: long, deep with analysis and context, and accompanied by charts and graphics.

And since those stories are still online, there was no reason for the paper to print them again in this Sunday's paper as part of a tally of the election. Instead, there are eight questions, eight one-word answers (three words in one case) and then eight longer answers with context and election results. It looks something like this:

1. The Elephant in the Room: How big a problem is President Bush for the GOP? The short answer: Big (The long answer talks about anti-Bush sentiment wiping out some unlikely candidates)

2. Money Matters: Will pocketbook concerns move voters? The answer: Sometimes

3. Tune In, Turn On: Which issues will send voters to the polls? The answer: Check in '08

And so on.

It's vintage political and governmental reporting. Does anyone do that as well as The Washington Post? But even such a venerable and traditional newspaper as the Post makes use of the Web to send readers back and forth to the medium that best serves each particular story.

For readers here in Post territory who want to reread the extensive stories that comprised the 2006 Bellwether Project, they're just a mouse click away. For readers who don't want to go back, who don't have the time, or who don't have a computer, there is just enough information in today's paper to update them on the issues.

It's good packaging. It's one of the great benefits of the Web, and one that we ought to exploit more than we do.

Sometimes there's a tendency to want to repeat every word and punctuation mark for readers who missed it the first time. But space is limited, resources are limited, and attention is limited. The Web gives us a place to be a 'paper of record' and frees us in print to experiment with brevity and alternative approaches to telling stories and presenting data.

I've got the benefit of both the Web package and the paper's synopsis in front of me. While the archival stories are certainly more detailed, I have enough information in today's story to sound smart on the subway, if that's my only option.

The travel portion of this "Newsroom of the Future" journey is coming to an end. Next week I'll be visiting the University of Maryland's J-Lab, which can probably be considered the nexis for the entire citizen media movement.

Then onward to The Washington Post's online newsroom, which is not only housed in a separate building from the main Washington, D.C., newsroom, but in a separate state. That makes for some tricky convergence. Stay tuned for details on how the two newsrooms communicate and for an inside peek at an online operation considered by many to be the best among American newspapers.

Then on to Cambridge, Mass., and the Media Lab at MIT. Since 1985, faculty, researchers and students have been on the hunt for innovation. MIT's own literature acknowledges that skeptics initially thought the lab's approach was unorthodox.

But since its inception, faculty and graduates have started more than 60 companies and have helped create now-familiar technology such as digital video and wearable computers, and done pioneering work in computation and human-machine interfaces.

Researchers at MIT are all about "creating a future where machines not only augment human capabilities, but also relate to people on more human terms." In other words, a future where a computer can tell whether or not I'm bored by a story I'm reading. Yikes.

My visit to MIT is all about the 'real' future, a place we can't even imagine yet in which technology will impact the way we communicate with one another. What can we learn at MIT that puts us ahead of the curve? Most of the concepts we're talking about today - audio and video, convergence, fielded data - are based on existing technology. Most newspapers are just in various stages of "catching up" to it.

But what's out there conceptually? And what can we do now to be ready, even if it's years away from coming true?

The last stop after MIT is Harvard and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

If MIT is about the technology, then Berkman is about relationships - specifically, how cyberspace impacts our lives, our practices, our laws and sanctions. Berkman is part of Harvard Law School; its faculty provides the bulk of the research into the relationship between law and cyberspace. So, from Berkman we're going to hear about issues such as privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control and electronic commerce. How will those issues impact the journalism we practice tomorrow? Stay tuned.

When this final trip is complete, the real work begins: not just a final report that offers some proposals for changing our newsroom practices, but the start of what I hope will be an ongoing conversation here at The Spokesman-Review about our role as journalists in a rapidly changing world.

As part of this technology safari, I've tried to pay attention to how people live and work in this high-tech age.

And we seem to do it by living in a state of perpetual distraction.

It's somehow appropriate that many of us in this Online Leadership seminar are multi-tasking. At least half the class of 20 have laptops, Treos or Blackberries. Most everyone else has a cell phone
clipped to their waistband or purse (I think I saw maybe two Old World yellow legal pads in the entire room, and one of those was mine even though I also have a laptop and Treo). There are so many mobile devices set to vibrate in this class that if they all went off at once they might trigger an earthquake.

There is, of course, high-speed Internet access in all the hotel rooms. And there is a business center off the hotel lobby with computers as well.

Two papers are delivered to my hotel door every morning: USA Today and The St. Petersburg Times.

CNN is on around-the-clock in the hotel's breakfast/lounge area.

Our bus driver wears one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear.

And then this morning, I read an editorial in the St. Pete paper by Thomas L. Friedman (New York Times News Service). He was riding in a taxi in Paris recently and calculated that he and his driver had been together about an hour and between them had been doing six different things: The taxi driver was driving, talking on his ear-phone and watching a video from his dashboard. Friedman was riding, working on his laptop and listening to his iPod.

Friedman's editorial goes on to quote technologist Linda Stone, who says we're suffering from an Internet-age disease called "continuous partial attention."

Says Stone: "We're so accessible, we're inaccessible. We can't find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise..."

This is the fragmented world, then, that mass-market newspapers find themselves competing in. Everyone wants to "break through" with their message. How will we do that? And if we do, do we have any hope of holding anyone's attention for very long?

In yesterday's Poynter sessions we dissected one way to do that: citizen-generated content. The theory goes like this: what we have to say doesn't carry as much weight anymore. People are multi-tasking, pulling in pieces of information simultaneously from Treos and laptops and Bluetooths and CNN and satellite radio and Web sites....and newspapers. But if we give them a voice, if we make room on our printed pages and on our Web pages for their thoughts, their videos, their playlists, they'll be much more likely to pause, to interrupt the constant flow of noise, and give us some time. And if we're lucky, they might even do it again. And again.

The state of the newspaper industry reminds me of these last few days before elections: everyone has an ad running on TV, everyone has a campaign sign in the front yard, every candidate is ringing doorbells and working the Rotarian circuit. Everyone has a pitch.

Newspapers are just one of dozens of candidates out on the election trail. Will readers listen to our pitch, or are they too busy partially paying attention?

It's interesting how many papers - big and small -are right now trying to figure out how to create breaking news teams and continuous news desks.

You can get so focused on your own newsroom that you think you're hoplessly behind everyone else. But a lot of us are in the same place, trying to figure out how to unite our print and Web cultures.

The media companies represented here at Poynter all have unique problems to solve, but it appears we share one issue: we want to add content to our Web sites, but we can't hire more people to do it.

That makes for some tricky choices.

We talked about how to make people comfortable with uncomfortable change.

The most important tip is one that I think busy newsrooms often forget: take time to explain 'why' change is necessary.

Why do newspapers need to care about the Web?

How about these answers?

71-72 percent of U.S. households are online (Nielsen/NetRatings, Jupiter Research and Pew Internet Project).

46 percent of U.S. households have home broadband (Pew, Nielsen/NetRatings)

24 percent of GenY (18-26) read blogs regularly (Forrester Research/Gallup Research)

28 percent of people age 18-24 do not consume any news. (Jupiter)

96 percent of U.S. children have gone online. (Kaiser Family Foundation)

Day 1 of the Poynter seminar "Online Leadership: Fundamentals of a Changing World."

This is a good group with representatives from some very good papers: Newsday, The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Austin American-Statesman, and The Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier. There are a few smaller papers here (Wyoming Tribune-Eagle and Longview (Texas) News-Journal) and the assistant editor of The Press in Christchurch, New Zealand. There is one TV rep: a senior producer or CBC.ca News Online in Toronto.

Big or small, we seem to share many of the same issues: how to spread "the Web DNA" deep into the newsroom culture; how to do more journalism online or more 24/7 journalism online WITHOUT adding resources; how to edit citizen content (or whether we even should); how to train for multimedia (should everyone be a backpack journalist or should you have a few multimedia experts?), and how do we create a strategic content plan that includes multimedia.

There is much to learn here. Several papers are currently trying to develop a continuous news desk or a breaking news team. Others are trying to figure out how to get more coordination between the newsroom and the online side (Who decides when to add multimedia, for instance?), and still others are trying to move from a place where they repurpose print content to generating original content.

Most of us don't seem to know much about the business side of our Web sites. There will be a whole session on that, from new revenue and advertising opportunities, to search engine marketing and ad formats.

By the end of this seminar on Friday, we're promised "a plan" that will help each of us change one process or practice in our newsrooms. I have an idea what that change should be for The S-R; I'm curious to see if that will change by Friday.

Tampa resembles the converged newsroom in Lawrence, Kan., in just one respect: both run simultaneous print, Web and TV operations. The rest is a matter of scale.

Media General, which owns the Tampa operation, built its all-in-one News Center in 2000. It is a three-floor complex with an atrium in the middle of the second and third floors. The TV assignment desk, the hub of activity and noise, is located in the middle of the second floor under the atrium. The Tampa Tribune newsroom is on the third floor, ringing the TV pod from above with a railing.

Metro Team Leader Howard Altman, who manages the cops and courts reporters (the team primarily responsible for online content), likes to joke that he's practicing convergence by hanging over his third-floor railing and shouting to the TV folks below, "Anything going on?"

But as practiced in Tampa, convergence is a little more strategic than that. Yet, while stories are reported and edited for three distinct platforms in what is arguably one of the country's most competitive media markets, Tampa is surprisingly behind the curve in some respects.

Just because they get a lot of industry attention doesn't mean there's universal buy-in. As is typical, there are hold-outs in the reporting and editing ranks who don't like sharing scoops with their TV colleagues or the Web. And Tampa is still not operating a continuous news desk, something I would have expected by now (I'm told a plan is coming soon) given the competition between The Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times.

Even without a 24-hour reporting system, The Tampa operation is impressive. The paper covers three counties, TV Channel 8 covers 13 and is the biggest station in all of Florida. Many of the paper's reporters work with video and audio, and most all share their sources and tips with TV. The paper's Business department produces and presents TV content on the air five-days-a-week.

The paper's Sports editor is very likely the only Sports editor in the country to head up a converged operation, meaning he manages content and reporters for all three platforms because Sports lends itself to the TV-multimedia culture. (For other departments in the newsroom, there are corresponding print, Web and TV managers)

A multimedia coordinator, Kenneth Knight, keeps track of it all from his seat on the TV assignment desk under the atrium.

Thanks to a Media General internship program designed for multimedia, the paper was able to train and hire a reporter who has become a special projects whiz.

Reporter Julie Pace teams up with a photographer to work on multimedia breaking news or enterprise stories three days a week with a plan to expand to five.

This is how she managed a typical story recently on how the rising cost of living hurts senior citizens:

For the newspaper she reported and wrote a trend piece examining the larger issues, focusing on a company that hires senior workers.

For TV, she reported and wrote a 2-3 minute piece (the photographer shot the video) focused on one man who works at a local stadium for spending money.

For the Web site, she wrote a synthesized story and added links back to the TV report and the story in the paper. In addition, she added results from a newspaper poll, an audio recording from yet another interview, and links to community services. The photographer added a slide show of photos that didn't make it into the paper.

Pace and the photographer started the project at 5 p.m. on a Monday. By 1 p.m. the next day, everything I just listed was online and the TV package made the 5:30 p.m. newscast. The newspaper package was in the Wednesday morning paper.

Pace, who is 24, may well be the spokesman for her generation, and certainly the best promoter of 'multimedia as the savior of newspapers' I've heard yet:

Her words:

"People underestimate young people. They really do read newspapers. We need to think of the Web as a supplement. If you just repurpose (print content onto the Web), you're handing people a reason not to buy your paper."

As a broadcast major at Northwestern, Pace read many newspapers - most of them online. But she thought of herself as a "newspaper reader."

"If you see a story unfold online, then as a reader you know that paper is working the story and you'll pick up that paper to read more the next day. If breaking news is not on the Web, how do readers know you're working it?"

If reporters and editors take control of the Web, it'll have depth and ethics, says Pace.

What does she see for the future of newspapers? Eventually Web sites like TBO.com will become the primary platforms for delivering news and papers will contain stories with second-day leads, context and analysis. We'll no longer think of the newspaper as the place to 'break news,' she predicts.

Even as Tampa leads us into the future, some reporters and editors cling to old notions and fears.

Executive Editor Janet Weaver builds at least an hour into every day to walk the floor and talk to people.

"We’re not dying, but we'll have to change in ways that make us uncomfortable and that feels like we're dying," she says.

She hears a lot of variations of, 'I didn't sign on to do a package for TV. I didn't sign on to have it be about data instead of stories. Where's the romance in that?'

Weaver talks about a line from an Eagles song that goes something like, 'sometimes the brightest light is from the burning bridge.'

But you've got to get everything you want to save across the bridge first. "We talk about serving the readers, but most of us got into the business because we love the craft," she says. "Some of the things we love aren't going to make it over the bridge, but our values will."

From Louisiana to Florida.

Coming next, notes from a site visit to The Tampa Tribune, one of the largest, most respected converged news operations in the country. The paper's daily circulation is about 220,000 and Sunday is 315,000.

The Tribune's News Center houses a newspaper staff of about 300, a TBO.com online staff of about 11 and a TV Channel 8 (NBC affiliate) staff of about 100.

The level of activity in Tampa's converged operation makes the busy Lawrence, Kan., converged newsroom feel like a Greyhound bus station in the middle of the night.

Tampa rocks.

From there to Poynter, a school for journalists, in St. Petersburg, Fla. I'll be attending a seminar on Online Leadership that promises to synthesize many of the ideas of this project.

In a previous post I talked about "citizen journalism." I traveled to Bakersfield, Calif., to observe The Voices - home-delivered tabloids of non-professional content published by The Bakersfield Californian. Although Bakersfield was a forerunner in this kind of citizen media, there are now dozens of other projects throughout the country, many of them outside Big Media companies.

This week's APME conference featured a session on citizen media called "New Voices, New Content."

This was the advertisement for the session: "Driven by need, despair or entrepreneurship, citizens are creating their own forms of small-j journalism to cover community news, and news organizations are finding traction in some of their techniques. Editors have a lot to learn from citizen-driven media."

Here are three more examples of citizen-produced news:

1. The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., has a team of "MoJos," or Mobile Journalists, who work out of their cars with wireless laptops and digital cameras. They work in 8 "micro-communities" around the greater Fort Myers area, reporting and writing intensely local neighborhood news. The four MoJos, all professionals, concentrate on volume, regularity and urgency.

They post stories continuously to micro-sites within the larger News-Press Web site. In other words, each micro-neighborhood has its own mini-Web site of information ranging from school news to crime blotters. They shoot their own pictures, post them to the Web, manage the Web sites, and recruit citizen-content providers.

In addition, 8 other reporters who regularly write for the newspaper's weekly neighborhood print sections also contribute content for the micro sights.

This is one way the paper creates the kind of hyper-local content that more and more people seem to demand from us, but isn't always easy to do in print. Some of the micro sites are small; there may not be hundreds of people regularly reading news from them. It wouldn't make sense to put that kind of limited and selective content into the traditional mass-market newspaper if only a handful of people care. But it does make sense to put it online where space is limitless and news is continuous.

This experiment has certainly changed our notion of journalists who go out into the field to report and then return to their newsrooms to write for both the paper and the Web. These MoJos are roaming their communities, almost professionally living in them, and their content is only seen on the Web.

The News-Press also is experimenting with something called "crowd sourcing," which is a mixture of professional and amateur reporters. For a recent investigation into a sewer controversy, the paper advertised for citizen help with the following invitation: "Help us Investigate."

Within 12 hours, 68 people responded to a forum site with information and commentary for the story. Within 24 hours, a reader in another country offered up a key confidential document that helped the paper 'break' the story. The citizen contributors were liberally credited for their help in subsequent stories on the Web and in the newspaper.

The newspaper also arranged a town hall meeting, but all the questions were posed by citizens. There were, however, several MoJos in the audience, covering the meeting for their micro-communities and posting continuous updates to the Web as questions were asked and answered. In all, more than 6,000 citizens contributed in some way to the project, through e-mails, phone calls, and interaction on a specially-created forum.

Dispatches from multimedia day at the Associated Press Managing Editors conference:

This morning's keynote speaker, Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says that newspapers are using the Web but not in the way it was conceived and not innovatively. A lot of papers are still just repurposing their print content and not thinking about origination.

Warning: the WashingtonPost.com operation employs 80 people. That's a lot of origination power, but much of what Brady suggested is applicable to smaller papers.

Brady's five opportunities on the Web:

1. Distribution. We don't control formats but we can exploit them. Find multiple ways to get content to users such as video/audio, cell phone feeds, RSS, e-mail newsletters. "Don't be on the Web, be OF the Web."

2. Audience targeting. Get over the initial hurdle. Get users to your Web site once by throwing out "multiple fishing lines" and many will return. Do that by "building communities" around topics of interest people care about, whatever that is: high school sports, gardening, Elvis. Build a community and they will come.

3. Storytelling/multimedia. The beauty of the Web is its flexibility; it allows you to tell stories in different ways: text, photo slideshows, panoramic photos, video, audio, interactive graphics, live chats, citizen journalism, blogs.

4. Databases/mashups. "The endless news hole on the Web is a myth. You can only host as much content as you can produce." Databases are endless. WashingtonPost.com excels at databases.

Example 1: a Votes database (back to 1991) that allows users to sort by state, by votes, by missed votes, by astrological sign (Yes, really). This site is so comprehensive that other papers use it to originate content: how many votes has our representative missed? The Post offers RSS feeds on this (and everything else) so readers can be notified when their legislator did or did not vote.

Example 2: Faces of the Fallen (The Spokesman-Review has a similar database) that allows sorting by age, home state, branch of service, date of death.

Examples 3-5: Databases on Gitmo detainees, Sept. 11 victims, and reporter profile pages with lists of recent stories and alerts when they write new stories.

Example 6: Midterm Madness, a Fantasy Football-like site for mid-term elections.

5. Reader engagement. Citizen blogs and staff blogs enabled with reader comment are good ways to build engagement with the paper. Blogs have a bad reputation, but they're just "another format" for presenting information, just shorter and edgier than traditional stories.

This blog is supposed to be about the search for technological answers to all our industry questions, but I have to make a slight detour.

Suddenly our fear about the future doesn't seem so important in comparison with the experience I just had touring the devastated areas of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

I spent the morning on the Freedom Forum bus, weaving in and out of ghost towns in the Lower 9th Ward and seeing up close the damage of Hurricane Katrina. And then we rode along the coastal highway outside Biloxi, Miss., where the destruction only looks more genteel.

As APME President Suki Dardarian said in her opening remarks, the newspaper industry is in "great need of perspective."

You can find perspective pretty easily in New Orleans.

Front-line editors and publishers may think they're in the fight of their lives, but it's not even close. Not when you see front steps and driveways that lead to nowhere. Not when you see the graffiti code on houses and buildings that rescue workers used as a form of gruesome shorthand: 1 dead inside; dog under the porch; no gas. Nobody home.

God, what a mess. Still.

And yet, so much has apparently improved. It's saying something when the manager of a hotel takes the podium to thank conventioneers for coming to his city to spend money.

So, the newspaper industry is doing pretty good, I think, if all we really need to figure out is how to use multimedia intelligently and remain a relevant source of news to our readers. Here in New Orleans, residents understand relevancy, too bad it took a monumental natural disaster to drive home that point. Residents here are still apparently hugging local reporters and editors, thankful for the information they're providing.

How can I get a reader to hug me in Spokane?

Dardarian reminded the group that newspapers have always been challenged by emerging technology; first it was radio, then TV, then our own industry conversion to basic computer technology.

This is a familiar place to us; we can figure this out.

We're "the storytellers who tell the truth."

Dardarian implored editors here to "get on the bus" and get a new perspective.

I did and it was powerful and depressing and sobering.

There are so many stories to tell and we tell them. That's what we do. The rest is a piece of cake.

I seem to be chasing Rob Curley.

By the time I got to the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., in September, the multimedia journalism star had already come and gone. He was at the Naples Daily News in Naples, Fla., and folks in Lawrence talked about him in reverential terms.

Among his projects for the Journal-World: kusports.com, a one-stop shopping site for the Kansas Jayhawks, which featured live play-by-play, animated playbooks and computer simulation.

Just a few weeks ago, Curley was hired at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

"I want to prove that what I do can work anywhere," says Curley in the Fast Company profile. "I don't want to be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I want to make it float again."

I'll be visiting the Post's Web operation in November. I've got a request in to Curley for an interview. We'll see if I can catch him.

Meanwhile, the man who apparently calls himself "just a nerd from Kansas," is almost the equivalent of a newspaper rock star.

Fast Company's profile of Curley is a good one because it manages to illustrate the divide that still plagues newspapers and Web sites.

While newspapers are still struggling to integrate the Web and print, from somewhat of a position of "panic," according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, the University of Maryland's interactive journalism institute, Curley is on a different level.

"Unlike previous ink-stained generations, he and his mostly young charges practice journalism with software code, video, podcasts, audio, slide shows, blogs - whatever works. Multimedia storytelling comes as naturally to him as satire did to Mencken. Likewise, interactivity: The notion of a newspaper as a conversation rather than a lecture doesn't strike fear in Curley, the way it does some newspaper purists."

I'm heading to New Orleans for the annual
Associated Press Managing Editors Association (APME) conference. Usually as much social as practical, this year's conference actually is perfectly focused on the goals for this "Newsroom of the Future" project.

Themed "Rejuvenate. Reinvent. Rejoice," the sessions are about recommitting to our craft and embracing our future. There will most certainly be an undercurrent of celebration as the city of New Orleans fights on in its struggle to recover from Hurricane Katrina. And it makes a certain bit of sense to hold a journalism conference in a region that has experienced natural disaster because there will be much to learn about how the media responded to the crisis and how it challenged our compassion, leadership and planning.

In fact, out of Katrina came one of the most powerful examples in recent times of the need for civic journalism. With so much destroyed and in desperate need of information, residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast hungered for news, and journalists - their homes destroyed too - did their duty.

One of the sessions this week is titled, "Leadership in Trying Times: The Gulf Coast Story," featuring New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the editors of
the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss.

In what I anticipate will be one of the most meaningful aspects of the conference, Gulf Coast editors and reporters will be conducting bus tours of recovery and devastation in New Orleans and Biloxi for the visiting journalists.

So, if part of the conference is about looking back, remembering and rejoicing, then the other part is about looking forward. And as this blog has been noting for weeks, the newspaper industry is all about the future: What will it mean? What will it look like? Will we have jobs?

The keynote speaker is Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, considered one of the best newspaper Web operations in the country along. (I'll be visiting Brady's operation in November)

Brady will acknowledge that the Web feels like a threat to newspapers but should really be considered an opportunity for its "unparallel" ability to allow us to interact with readers. The Post is really doing amazing work with video and audio, but their databases most interest me because they appeal to my traditional notions. Can't join the bandwagon on podcasts and funky videos? Then how about databases that on the surface fill the practical need for information (day-care lists, voting trends, crime trends, housing prices) but below the surface lead to high-end enterprise and investigative reporting? Now THAT I can get excited about!

Among the speakers who will talk about 21st century newsrooms are editors from ChicagoCrime.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and our own Ken Sands, online publisher of spokesmanreview.com.

Also on the program are discussions about "citizen journalism" and the American Press Institute's "Newspaper Next Project." (see previous posts on both topics)

Moderators for the "New Voices, New Content" (citizen journalism) session are Jan Schaffer of the University of Maryland's J-Lab (which I'll be visiting in November) and Peggy Kuhr, from The University of Kansas, who recently allowed me to observe her Rosedale Middle School journalism project (the kids' Web site is still a work in progress).

In all, this APME conference should be both informative and inspiring. With sessions titled, "Building Trust in the News: 101 + Good Ideas;" "Winning Back Women Readers," and "When Cultures Collide: Combining Web/Print Newsrooms," how could there not be at least a couple practical tips to steal?

If saving the newspaper industry isn't reason enough to get creative, how about $5 million?

In case you need further proof that innovation matters, here it is: The venerable Knight Foundation is offering a total of $5 million for community news experiments that help lead us into the future.

The Web site asks, "Who will do in the 21st century what our founders, the Knight brothers, did with their newspapers in the last century?"

Newspapers have historically defined the communities in which they exist. They shape how people think about community and "how we understand what's happening on our block or around the world."

The $5 million-dollar-question is: Who will perform this function now that digital media has changed the way we send and receive information?

The News Challenge contest seeks ideas for using "new media" combined with the best news values to bind and build communities.

Anybody in the world can enter as long as they have an innovative idea that uses the digital world to connect people in the real world. That, according to the foundation, is the only rule.

The contest is open to companies, individuals and nonprofits. You don't need to be a U.S. citizen to apply. It's open to everyone around the world.

The deadline for submitting a letter of inquiry (brief summary of proposal) is Dec. 31, 2006.

Enter at www.newschallenge.org.

Quote of the day, from Dana Robbins, editor of The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario.

"We spend too much time thinking we're a dying industry and not enough time thinking we're an evolving industry. Why do we frame the question like, 'what's going to save newspapers?' There's a degree of fatalism that has clouded our thinking. We're not making good strategic decisions."

Robbins is known for being candid, refreshingly so. He's also the editor who said the newspaper industry doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to reinvent itself at the speed that's needed to survive.

And he's also the editor who said he'd "rather be embarrassed occasionally by what I see in our newspaper than bored."

Meet Dana Robbins, editor of a newspaper that the October issue of Editor & Publisher called a "rock star" for its radical and edgy reinvention of its newspaper.

Robbins was gracious to give me more than an hour on the phone, despite a whole lot of stress on his end with some recent shake-ups in parent company Torstar Corp., which also publishes The Toronto Star.

It's no exaggeration to say that The Hamilton Spectator has seriously redefined what a metropolitan newspaper looks like.

Some demographics: Hamilton (like most Canadian newspapers) is a 6-day-a-week operation 40 miles outside Toronto. Circulation is about 108,000 daily. It faces tremendous competition from The Toronto Star, "which dumps thousands of free newspapers into our market every day, and unfortunately, they're not trashy newspapers either."

Under the leadership of Robbins, The Spec has undergone two "revolutions," the most recent having debuted about two weeks ago.

Combined, the sweeping content and cultural changes led to some pretty radical decisions. To wit: they pretty much killed off whole sections of the paper including Business, Food and the traditional Local or Metro section.

Instead, The Spec is now a two-section paper. The A section is a "newspaper within a newspaper," says Robbins. It contains all of the day's news - the public life of the community, province, country. It includes a photo-driven feature on pages A3 and A4 called "Top of the World." Robbins describes it as a compilation of the top 20 or so international stories of the day, told in a "really literate" NPR-like radio script format.

Behind "Top of the World" is "Behind Today's News," which is all the context and analysis behind the day's headlines. For example, Wednesday's paper ran the complete transcript of a speech by Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, talking about the state of AIDS in Canada.

After the context - and we're still in the A section, now - is "Feature Read," which offers stories that make an emotional connection with Robbins. In fact his editors apparently have a 'does it make Dana cry?" test.

And then comes a local news section of mostly short stories with a heavy emphasis on nontraditional story forms like graphics, maps, transcripts. The average length of a business story is 1 1/2 inches. ("That sound you hear is me burning in effigy in my parking lot," Robbins jokes, referencing the reaction by some of his staff).

The A section ends with editorials and opinion.

All of that content is in ONE section of the paper.

I felt a little like a traitor this morning, criticizing story decisions I would have made exactly the same way a month ago.

Editor Steve Smith asked me to attend this morning's news meeting to talk about the paper's coverage of the Joseph Duncan plea agreement.

I haven't been attending the morning meetings since starting this "Newsroom of the Future" project. Our thinking was that I could be more valuable to editors here if I came at the news "cold," without the benefit of advance knowledge.

So, like most of our readers and Web users, I've been waiting for the news like everyone else.

But this morning I sat 'at the table' to talk about our Duncan coverage, which felt frankly pretty old by the time I read it this (Tuesday) morning in my newspaper. And that's because we had done such great 'breaking news' coverage of the story yesterday morning (Monday) on our Web site.

I watched our Web site all day yesterday. We posted the news about the plea agreement very quickly. We had a fresh photo of Duncan up on the site before the TV stations. In short, we exploited the Web exactly the way we should have.

So, 24 hours later, in this morning's paper, I expected to see a different kind of story, one that elevated the "what's next" aspects of the case, and one that sought to answer questions like, "how did this happen?" and "what does it mean?"

Instead, our bold headline across the top of A1 read, "Duncan admits guilt," as if that was the first time we were reporting the news. It felt old to me. We needed a different kind of headline, a different kind of display treatment, a different kind of second-day lead on the stories.

And so I said that at the morning meeting, knowing full well that before I started this project and started exposing my traditional notions to new ways of thinking, I would have made the same decisions.

I'm waiting for the internal hate mail to start rolling in.

The good news (and there IS good news) is that our stories had all the key information. This would be a much bigger issue if we didn't have the reporting or editing talent to ask and answer those contextual questions. We have that talent in here. A lot of talent.

If you read this morning's stories all the way to the end, you'll find answers to those contextual questions.

My gripe is that we shouldn't make readers wait that long on a story that is 24 hours old by the time it hits their doorstep. We "broke" the story of the plea deal online Monday morning. In fact, we hinted it was coming in Sunday's paper.

Duncan is such a big community story here that I can't imagine there were but three people in our region who didn't know on Monday what happened.

So, why duplicate that information in the next day's paper? Why not use your resources in a different way?

This is one of the most vexing issues facing newsrooms right now: how to use the Web and the newspaper effectively - and uniquely.