"NCEW is determined to find its way online in a hurry," says Eddie Roth.
In The Opinion Pool, RJI, NCEW and media outlets partner to find new ways to take opinion journalism online, make it trusted and build its traffic.
By Eddie Roth, editorial writer, Dayton Daily News; coordinator of The Opinion Pool project
The National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW) is determined to find its way online in a hurry, and in a very big way.
Its members represent newspaper editorial pages large and small, coast to coast. They seek to become online players by creating online places that become the most highly trafficked and trusted sources of opinion and informed discussion on local public affairs in their home communities.
The group has launched a project called The Opinion Pool for this purpose, and RJI is a research partner.
“On one level, this project is about the practical — how to help our members provide effective online opinion with the resources available,” said NCEW president Vanessa Gallman, editorial page editor at the Lexington Herald-Leader.
“But it is also an effort to understand how readers use online opinion and how it can encourage civic involvement. That is where the research by the Reynolds Institute will be invaluable.”
The project was hatched at a June 2007 meeting hosted by the Kettering Foundation. In addition to RJI Executive Director Pam Johnson, that meeting was attended by Ann Grimes, Acting Director of the graduate journalism program at Stanford University, Kevin Riley, editor in chief of Cox Ohio Publishing newspapers, Joni Silverstein, vice president for market development at Gannett Corp. at the time, former San Francisco Chronicle Publisher John Oppedahl (who moderated the meeting), the NCEW executive board and Kettering Foundation staff.
The idea of joining together as an industry to find ways to present credible opinion journalism online has sparked widespread interest. “The first I heard of this project,” Johnson says, “was a phone call from Miriam Pepper, editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star. Would I be interested? Of course. I was excited immediately. This is all about bringing opinion journalism to the public in new ways.”
Here's how the project is getting under way:
Opinion page staffs and research departments at eight pilot properties — from Seattle to Vero Beach to Kansas City and other points in between — are working together to build model online templates for local opinion journalism.
The sites seek to nail down the right technologies, and to create practical work flows for online routines that can be sustained by a small staff in partnership with the community. They also are intent on developing metrics that move beyond page views and help to measure which strategies are working, and why.
But first NCEW is undertaking an intense burst of research. The object is to better understand online habits, tastes and interests of potential readers and audiences — especially those under the age of 40.
NCEW is sponsoring focus group sessions in Seattle, Des Moines and Vero Beach in late February and early March — organized by the research departments at the Seattle Times, Des Moines Register, Scripps (Florida) Treasure Coast Newspapers, and Gannett Corp., with assistance from Ken Fleming, director of the Center for Advanced Social Research at RJI.
The focus groups’ goal is to discern how young participants approach public issues of importance, where they turn to inform their opinions, what media tools they find valuable for understanding what's at stake and participating in the debate. The hope is to understand how to go about building an engaging online place to go for informed opinion on local community affairs — a place that could become part of their online routine.
RJI then will conduct surveys in the pilot site markets. The surveys will be designed to test some of the observations and recommendations from focus group participants and answer these larger questions: What are the values of editorial pages and opinion pages to the communities newspapers serve? and How can journalists offer an effective online model that delivers high quality, interactive opinion journalism?
With research results in hand, the pilot sites will experiment, innovate, and collaborate on the fly — with a goal of going fully live by the end of 2008.
“This research won’t sit on a shelf gathering dust,” says Gallman. “In these troubled times for the media, what we learn will be crucial for the industry’s survival.”