Finding local voices for op-ed balance.

Lots of good local copy. That's what we wanted for Dayton Daily News's editorial pages: High-quality stuff that represents a range of voices, something different from the same old faces staging the same old songs. And I won the lucky assignment to find them.

Lucky me. Really. The project has been a delight, relatively easy to manage and - judging from letters and phone-in comments popular with readers.

The problem was typical: While we had local folks who wrote occasional op-ed pieces, we lacked commentary focused on local issues. So, we decided to stage a contest. I revived and refreshed the Daily News's Community Board of Contributors, which had died off in 1990.

In a January column, I asked readers to send in two sample 650-word columns, a photograph, some background information, and three ideas for future columns. We would choose 10 of them to write twice a month for a year about local issues and would pay them a token amount ($25 a column). I had confidence in the rules, since I borrowed extensively from the Tallahassee Democrat, where they've successfully run a similar program for years.

The response was amazing. More than 160 readers sent in samples. We sorted for writing skills and for representation of the diverse political and ethnic mix of our urban, suburban, and rural readership.

Our choices looked good: A talented high-school sophomore; a former psychiatric nurse and foster parent; an urban planner and native Daytonian; a blue-collar worker with natural writing talent; a former mayor and lieutenant governor; a divorce lawyer; a conservative, pro-growth suburbanite; an independent grant writer with interests in the arts; a university educator on history and race relations; a farm wife, stay-at-home room, and self-described reactionary.

But would they work out? After all, they would have to produce timely, local copy that would require minimal management. I am pleased to say that after half a year, the most time-consuming part was getting the contributors in to have their pictures taken.

I encourage the writers to e-mail or fax the columns. Most, thankfully, prefer e-mail, which means I can send their edited copy back to them for review before it runs in the paper. Since I'm on my first year in Dayton, it ensures I don't make a newcomer's editing error and allows them to see how to tighten up their copy. I spend four hours or less on the project per week.

Their topics? When a post-Columbine bomb went off in her high school (no injuries), the sophomore told us about the students' reactions. When the new Star Wars movie came out, the blue-collar worker wrote about how he couldn't go to see it in his largely black community because there were no longer any first-run theaters. The ex-mayor weighed in with well-grounded insight about the city school's $20 million deficit.

We run about three or four columns a week. I keep a notebook of when columns ran to ensure I've sent over pay requests and also to use as a rough referral of who's next. When someone hasn't written in a while, I get on the phone and we usually figure out a topic in a matter of minutes. Sometimes I e-mail an idea.

Our payoff is what we'd hoped for - a bank of good-quality local copy to balance national and international commentary from syndicated columnists.

NCEW member Kay Semion is associate editor of the editorial pages for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. Her e-mail address is [e-mail]