Building an e-environment.

Let's be frank. This is not a success story. This is not another primer on how to crack the code to Internet success.

Precious few in our business have figured that out. And fewer yet how to make it pay. This is instead a dispatch from the front of one editorial department experimenting with opinion on the Web, and not simply by republishing our print product online.

Are we a success? No. Are our numbers moving in the right direction? Yes. Finally, yes. Early in the year, we at The Arizona Republic editorial pages launched a new online feature called "Plugged In." It was conceived as a vehicle to get informed opinions about Arizona news and politics online and into our Sunday perspective section.

Think of it as a newspaper from the outside-in. Rather than insiders--journalists--picking all the topics and writing all the copy, we went out and recruited lots of smart people in our community to serve those functions whenever they pleased.

These recruits are tapped into the Zeitgeist of news and politics in Arizona. They include a former governor, a former state attorney general, a popular magazine writer, a city councilman, a vice mayor, and a human rights activist, to name a few.

Many are household names in Arizona and have cachet with readers. Most have been newsmakers themselves at one time or another.

The idea is for these informed people to post their opinions on the news whenever the spirit moves them. All they do is e-mail their comments to us. We edit them--largely for typos--add a headline, and post the material online.

We also publish six of these opinions every week in our print Sunday Viewpoints section, using each vehicle to promote the other.

We began with no budget, no extra staffing, no Internet expertise, only the certitude that the business of news commentary is changing and that we ought to get with that change, not out of fear but out of an enthusiasm for opportunity at hand.

The Internet is not the enemy of print people. It is our doorway to electronic news, a development that in the form of television destroyed many a daily newspaper. Now comes the Internet, and it is our tool to compete where once we couldn't.

If you make a living expressing opinion for a major metro newspaper, the way you work will change. You will get faster. Count on it.

The game is immediacy. People don't just want the news fast; they want the context fast, which means you're not going to have days to ruminate. If you want time to chew on ideas, others will fill your void. The Internet not only speeds our delivery of the news but also accelerates the expectations of readers that news and commentary will be available when they want it.

Our "Plugged In" feature at The Arizona Republic is not the answer to that growing public craving for immediacy. But it will be part of it.

Eventually, we and other editorial pages will be publishing all day long, not just once at the end of the day for the run of the press.

Does this mean commentary will be void of thought? No, it means you will produce two kinds of commentary. One kind will be of the moment, written by people who come to issues quickly with a wealth of background expertise and knowledge. The other will be the kind we produce now, that requires more research, more thought, more time to simmer.

We are using "Plugged In" to try to get more informed commentary to our readers faster. But we want to do more. We want to create a site that is more personable and warmer than a typical newspaper web page.

We want Arizonans to go there and feel the buzz in their state and region--the western United States. To do that, we've added a roundup of Arizona political news, links to the best stories in the West's major newspapers, and links to state, regional, and national stories about the most important issues in Arizona.

The immigration debate is heating up here. An initiative drive has begun to make authorities enforce our existing immigration laws. This will be hot for a year to come, and we want to be the gateway to the most pertinent news on the issue.

Every day, we post anywhere from a half-dozen to two dozen state and national links on the immigration issue along with headlines and story leads. Our readers can see at a glance how various Arizona cities and western states are dealing with immigration.

We also post what we call our "Talker" links to stories all over the world that we find interesting. Editorial writers and editors are always sharing good story links with each other. At the Republic, we also share them with our readers.

And there is evidence readers are responding. When we kicked off "Plugged In" last winter, we had an initial surge of readership that dropped off considerably and remained stagnant for months afterwards. It told me we weren't ready for prime time.

We have been working every day to improve the site and have begun to build a steady readership. Today we are getting more hits than the traditional links on our editorial website. But we are still considered a "niche" site by our own online people.

There are two fascinating aspects to our numbers. One, people who go to a typical web page on our newspaper site generally spend about a minute or less. Readers who go to "Plugged In" are spending anywhere from four to seven minutes on the page.

Also, because we are doing this with no budget and no extra staff, we have to go dark when the editor goes on vacation. Recently I sat down with one of our Internet gurus to look at reader traffic. On a lark, he started pulling up the week in which we provided no content and no promotions leading people to the site. He said, "You're not going to get any hits on this week or hardly any."

But when the numbers popped up, so did his eyes. We had, in fact, drawn an exceptional number of readers that week. For him it was evidence that we had begun to build a loyal base--people who are in the habit now of clicking on the site every day.

"Plugged In" is a work in progress. We're not satisfied with the look and organization of the site. They need to improve. They are not intuitive for readers. It takes time to learn how to navigate the page, and we've probably lost many readers to that defect.

We will get better. Eventually, we'll add some of our own writers' voices along with the "Plugged In" contributors we have today. We'll add news pictures. And we'll figure out a way to clear out the clutter of story indexes that now crowd the screen.

But most important, we are an editorial department that is beginning to take control of its Internet environment. Given the future, that's more than a learning exercise. It's a necessity.

Phil Boas is the deputy editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic. He edits the Sunday Viewpoints section and the online "Plugged In" page. E-mail [e-mail]