Partner on a bold experiment: NCEW's pilot project aims to engage new opinion consumers.

The NCEW Executive Committee is launching a pilot project to partner with local communities and develop a new template for opinion journalism in new media.

NCEW president Neil Heinen says it may be "the most important endeavor" in NCEW's sixty-year history, one that will require the best thinking of our members. The decision was made in June at a two-day meeting between NCEW and industry leaders, hosted by the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.

The premise is this: Newspaper readers and opinion writers and editors have been well-served for decades by a familiar template--the editorial page (with its editorial rail, cartoonist's art, and letters to the editor) and the op-ed page (with its variable buffet of local, national, and international opinion offerings.)

Writers and editors know how to create these pages, just as readers know how to use them.

NCEW is fully committed to the printed page, which has a strong following of loyal readers. But for younger readers the template is of diminishing value in the expanding universe of interactive online media.

This poses a challenge to the role newspaper opinion pages have played in the civic life of local communities.

NCEW seeks to organize a network of up to five properties (across ownership lines), with each site working on its own online model, innovating on the go, and constantly communicating and sharing results with one another.

The purpose would be to build a model online template that delivers high-quality, interactive opinion journalism--much of it local--and helps cultivate a new generation of citizen contributors empowered to use the new media to promote civic dialogue and community problem solving.

Pilot participants would work not just to nail down the right technologies, but also to create practical strategies and workflows for sharing content and simultaneously publishing print opinion pages and managing an online opinion forum. They also would develop systems to ensure the emerging interactive community journalism adheres to professional journalism's standards of fairness and accuracy.

The pilot process would be transparent and its products open source--available to any news organization with a commitment to professional opinion journalism. The template could be built around a basic model for use by community newspapers' one-person opinion shops, or used with expanded features at larger properties with larger opinion staffs.

The next step is to broadly involve the NCEW membership in developing criteria for participation in the pilot, including:

* Resources needed for what period of time, including a commitment to coordinate and share market research at the start of the project.

* Strategies for engaging the local community in the template's design. The planning process will be wide open. If interest in the pilot exceeds five properties, the project could be expanded.

Eddie Roth is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. Email: eroth@ daytondailynews.com