Election offers insights from other side of fence.

A stint as political news editor for Campaign '96 underscores that editorial writers can do better.

One of my bosses likes to say that last year I came down from 30,000 feet and joined the real world of journalism.

He's referring to the fact that in 1996 I took a leave of absence from the editorial page and was the Dayton Daily News politics editor during the presidential campaign.

I'm still quibbling with him about whether editorial writers really cruise at an altitude all that different from others in journalism, but he had a point. Something can be learned from changing where you sit in the newsroom.

What dawned on me after a year of calling reporters at home with "just one more question" about their stories?

Editorial writers have the best job in the newspaper. Most days we get to build on the work reporters have started. We get to ask the questions that didn't occur to the poor soul who's taking the first cut at explaining an issue, telling a story or exposing an outrage, and probably doing so on deadline.

The details are often handed to us, so when we do our thing, the facts are waiting for us to pick apart. If critical information is missing, the follow-up stories cover that for us.

You'd think that given all the spade work that's done for us, we'd have the time and mind to make editorials a showcase for elegant writing and crisp thinking. You'd think that we wouldn't have any excuse for not taking clear positions that help readers think through an issue, even if they aren't persuaded of our views.

But we all know that too often this doesn't happen on editorial pages. Frequently our work rehashes an issue rather than advancing it. Too many times we confuse rather than illuminate. I came back to my job thinking, we can do better.

In part because I saw how much information reporters knew that they couldn't fit into their stories, I also promised that when my editing tour was up, I'd redouble my effort to make sure that I talk to reporters before I write my editorials, asking them even more questions than I had previously.

I'm firmer in my belief that editorial writers have an obligation to treat reporters as sources and, as a courtesy, provide them copies of editorials in advance of publication. Reporters deserve that much from us as their peers.

I was struck by the reactions of the people who filled in for me on the editorial page. They came away feeling that not all things are as simple as they look. Having an opinion is easy. But making sure you're right is something else.

They seemed to think that, on many days, leaving your work at the office was easier as a reporter than as an editorial writer. Knowing that you had interviewed and quoted the appropriate people is a science compared to knowing if you have sided with the right people or used their information to come to the right conclusion.

Learn to listen

Since I've come back to the editorial page, we're going to build on an experiment that we tried in the newsroom during the election campaign.

In an attempt to make sure we were writing about the issues and concerns that mattered most to voters, the election team organized a citizens panel that met five times between January and October 1996. The 200 citizens at the forums were divided into smaller groups to discuss pre-assigned topics. A reporter sat in on each of the group's discussions, with the goal of listening for themes and thoughts that seemed to resonate with the citizens.

Both editors and reporters found these discussions helped them ask better questions of all the candidates who were running, and the conversations led us to do some different kinds of election-year stories.

For example, our Labor Day story kicking off the fall campaign explored whether the American Dream needs to be down-sized. When we listened at length to voters' conversations about the economy, they weren't asking what the presidential candidates were going to do for them; they were debating whether Americans had come to expect too much.

Dayton has a hotly contested mayoral race this year, and we on the editorial page will be bringing different groups of voters together to talk about what they want their city to be like and the kind of person they'd like to have representing them. Editorial writers, not just reporters, can learn much from reaching out to citizens.

What we hear may often be similar to what's reflected in public opinion polls, but the experience is in itself illuminating, and we found that it pointed us in new and interesting directions.

I missed working on the editorial page, and I couldn't be happier to be back. The editorial page is the one place you get to be writer, reporter, and advocate all on the same day, all in the same piece of work.

We really do have the best job in the shop.

NCEW member Ellen Belcher is associate editor of the editorial page for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio.