Going online more than posting editorials.

Many readers complain that they don't under-stand how editorial boards reach their conclusions and, as a result, they question the credibility of their commentary.

All editorial writers have taken phone calls or read letters to the editor from such readers. We at The Arizona Republic set out to address some of those concerns directly last year, and we found "online" to be an excellent tool for both improving the quality of our work and more clearly communicating what we do and why to readers.

We tackled three projects in particular that involved considerable collaboration. Each proved to be a valuable resource to us and to readers. We hope to build on these successes this year.

Legislative Scorecard

We called it both the Scorecard on Steroids and the Scorecard from Hell, depending on its stage of development, but turned out to be a useful tool for us and readers in gauging the performance of lawmakers.

Imagine a large, full-color, laminated poster board nearly five feet tall and the width of your armspan. It's so wide that it actually hinges in the middle so we can fold it in half when we need to move it.

Down the left side are the names of the Arizona governor and all 90 legislators.

Across the top is a list of eight general topic areas that we identified early in the year as most important to shaping the state's future. They included managing growth, kids issues, education, health care reform, tobacco settlement money, and redistricting reform. Within each category was space for us to write specific bill numbers, speech references, committee actions, etc.

It was like a giant report card. When lawmakers did the "right thing" on issues we had editorialized were "important," we stuck a red "smily-face" sticker next to their names. When they did the "wrong thing" -- and there were lots of those -- we stuck an ugly lime-green "alien face" sticker next to the name. (One example -- and I'm not making this up -- was advocating that Arizona secede from the union.) We updated the tally board daily or weekly as events demanded.

Why go to such trouble over a scorecard? One of the key roles of an editorial board is to critique public office holders, but our critiques often are spontaneous, with little context or overarching perspective. Developing this as an accountability yardstick helped us -- and readers -- evaluate lawmakers' performances.

We published the Scorecard both in the newspaper and online shortly after the legislative session wrapped up in the spring. Its construction and publication served three specific purposes:

* It helped us keep better track of issues that we'd identified as important and of legislative conduct regarding them.

* It helped guide some of our election recommendations months later.

* And perhaps most important, it helped communicate to readers (and legislators) what the editorial board is all about, by reinforcing messages about what issues we believe are most important to Arizona's future and making us, as well as legislators, accountable to those calls.

Online, the Scorecard received nearly 3,200 page views and almost another 2,400 searches between its May 7 posting and Election Day. Those are pretty impressive numbers.

But the numbers get better.

Candidate Questionnaires

Days after the list of candidates was official in June, we mailed questionnaires to 249 legislative and congressional candidates statewide whose names would appear on the September 12 primary ballot. For legislators, the questionnaires covered the same topics we'd identified on our pages earlier as key to Arizona's future and that were reflected on our legislative Scorecard.

The congressional questionnaire focused on national issues of importance to us, including border, economic, foreign, and health-care policies. The cover letter told the candidates that we'd use their answers as one of several tools to help us discern which candidates to recommend for election and that we'd likely post their answers on our Web page for readers to view directly.

This was no small feat. It required the unprecedented cooperation of at least four newspaper departments, the construction of entirely new online templates, and the creation of 249 log-in names and passwords to assure some degree of security More than two-thirds of the candidates completed the questionnaires and either posted their responses directly online or mailed ore-mailed them to us to post their answers for them.

Again, the construction of such a questionnaire and posting it online served three specific purposes. First, it made us accountable in our candidate-recommendation process to the issues we'd said were important to us.

Second, the questionnaires were an invaluable source of reliable information (kinda hard to "misquote" someone's own written words) in our mad rush of election interviews and recommendations. (Even reporters relied on the posted answers to our questionnaires for some of their news stories.)

And third, it allowed readers direct access to information about both our editorial board priorities and candidates' positions.

The questionnaires drew nearly 13,500 page views between July and Election Day. That's 67% more page views than our entire Sunday Ideas section (many papers call it Perspective or Commentary) receives in a typical four-month period.

But the numbers get better.

Election recommendations

We began publishing recommendations in contested primaries in July for the September primary, and repeated the process for contested general-election contests in September for the November election. Like all editorials, these were posted daily on our Web page.

But unlike other editorials, candidate recommendation editorials stayed up all election season. They were grouped together on the site so that a single click of the mouse would get the viewer to the full collection. The collection grew almost daily and by the start of early voting contained every single recommendation we'd made in nearly every contested legislative and congressional contest in the state. By the time we stirred in editorials on 16 ballot propositions, we were looking at nearly 100 contests.

In the newspaper, we published a full page of these recommendation editorials, heavily excerpted, several times between the start of early voting and election day. But online is where the numbers were very impressive.

The online collection of recommendation editorials drew more than 93,000 page views in less than four months. That's more page views than the number of people who live in most Arizona cities. To be more specific, it's nearly 10 times the number of page views the entire Sunday Ideas section gets in a four-month period.

So why are these online projects so important? First and foremost, they go a long way to serving reader needs. They help communicate important information to readers in new and easily accessible ways. And they make the editorial page integral to the development and delivery of this key information.

How integral? Our Web pages experienced roughly twice as much traffic in 2000 than was normal since we first went online in 1998. Better display, site improvements, links, and promos were all key to this increase, but so was content. We routinely rival the business section and once even beat out the sports section in monthly page-views tallies.

Going online with these projects has helped our board pursue several principles we set for ourselves. It has helped us engage readers on our pages and to communicate better what we do and why we do it. Most important, it has helped us provide strong community leadership.

NCEW member Keven Willey is editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

E-mail her at [e-mail]

Tips for successful editorial/online projects

1. Make friends with the online department at your newspaper. To succeed, you must feel and act like you're all part of the same team.

2. Decide as an Editorial Page what you want to accomplish and why. Then include online people in brainstorming how to construct the project to make it successful. (Make sure you have the same expectations for the project.) In other words, don't go online just for the flash. Establish an objective that will benefit readers and then figure out how online can help.

3. Be creative and responsive to customer needs. Think like a time-pressed reader in the New Economy, not like an overworked, deadline-stressed, under-appreciated editorial writer.

4. Set target deadlines but be flexible. If it can go wrong the first time, it will. (It took us a couple of unanticipated weeks, for example, to work out the kinks of public access to our Questionnaire project.)

5. If you do something similar to our Questionnaire project that requires mass postings, don't offer to post questionnaire answers by hand. If candidates want to participate -- and they do -- they'll find a way to become online-literate or they'll find somebody who already is and will do it for them. (Sixty percent of the candidates who returned our questionnaires posted them online directly In another two years, online literacy will be even greater. It took two secretaries 15 hours of overtime to post the other 40% of questionnaires from candidates who declined to do so themselves -- not the best use of limited resources.)

6. Explain to readers in columns and editorials in the paper what you're doing and why Many will offer helpful suggestions on how to improve the process and/or the site next time.

7. Promote and link the heck out of everything you do -- preferably from the front page of the newspaper and the newspaper's main online page.

8. Make lists of How To Do It Better Next Time. File them where you will find them when you need them.

9. Have a little fun.

10. Share the credit.