Set editorial priorities with agenda.

I had been the editorial page editor at The Capital Times for about two years, operating in a single-person shop. Like many people in that position, I wrote mainly in reaction to events in the news.

Had some politician said something outrageous? Good, let's zap him. Was the city council about to vote on a development plan? Good, let's give it the wisdom of our editorial advice.

That was fun, but it seemed somehow insufficient. Our editorial positions were guided by a fairly well-developed progressive philosophy at the paper, but even with that backdrop, our editorials over time did not seem to have the kind of coherence that might give them a broader impact in the community.

When I was at the 1985 NCEW convention in Colorado Springs, one of the things that I saw was the editorial agenda page published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I liked the way it seemed to give a sense of priorities for the paper in the year ahead. I began talking to my editor about doing something similar at The Capital Times.

As I looked around the country, I found that not many papers published an agenda as such. I talked to Charles Dunsire at Seattle about the process the P-I used. My editor and I met to come up with a dozen issues on which we thought the paper ought to focus. We developed what we called a credo to provide the philosophical foundation for the pages.

We launched our first agenda in September of 1987. We noted in our editorial introducing the agenda that The Capital Times had actually run agendas in its early years during the 1920s. We said that with rare exceptions, our agenda items would be directed toward local and state issues, since that was the arena in which we had some influence.

We invited readers to respond to our selection. And we created a little logo for each item, so that when we wrote an editorial item about that topic, we could include the logo and thus give readers a visual clue that this was an agenda item.

Over the years, we have shifted the timing of the agenda to January, to coincide with the beginning of the year. We have shrunk the number of items from a dozen to eight or nine, since we found that with a larger number of items, some tended to get lost in the shuffle.

We have reprinted the agenda into a handout that we can use when we are guest speakers at events around town. We have put it on our Web site, along with links to more material on each topic.

So what difference has it made? Internally, I think it has helped us focus our editorial energies a little bit better. We now have a two-person staff an editorial board, and a variety of community input. But we are still a small operation and the agenda is a good vehicle for setting priorities.

Externally, decision-makers are clearly aware of our agenda. It is not unusual for candidates seeking the paper's endorsement to bring along a copy of the agenda and try to explain how their stances might mesh with ours. Nor is it unusual for public officials to pitch their initiatives to us by making reference to an appropriate agenda item.

Best of all, it creates the illusion that we are actually organized around here. In the chaotic world of the newsroom, that is no small accomplishment.

NCEW treasurer Phil Haslanger, managing editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., oversees the aditorial pages and is a member of the editorial board.