Thoughts on the new frontier from NCEW members: participants in the Kettering Foundation-hosted meeting reflect on the opinion page challenges.

NEIL HEINEN, NCEW president, editorial director, WISC-TV: The National Conference of Editorial Writers has embarked on the most important endeavor in its sixty-year history, shaping the future of opinion journalism. NCEW is making plans to partner with other industry leaders, executives, researchers, and academics--and members of local communities--to study the relationships between citizens and the media, especially the new digital media, and the role opinion journalism plays in those relationships.

The results must include a new, energized and invigorated opinion writers organization and a form of opinion journalism that will better foster community dialogues, citizen engagement, and a healthier democracy. We're excited about the future of our organization, our craft, and the communities we serve.

JONI SILVERSTEIN, vice president of market development, Gannett Co, Inc.: The editorial pages are something that, traditionally, have been important to us--in fact, they have been the heart of the newspaper to many of our best readers. The Kettering meeting was a great chance to see how people from the newspaper industry and from academic institutions are pondering how to create and build new and different ways to appeal to audiences--those that now turn to us and those that don't--when examining issues and forming opinions about public affairs and community life.

Now we need to determine what other audiences want from us, and understand how that might "look different." Then we have to deliver.

KEVIN RILEY, editor, Dayton Daily News: Opinion journalism has an important place in our past, present, and future. These journalists are intent on demonstrating to our industry the possibilities our future holds to remain leadership institutions in our communities.

PAM JOHNSON, executive director of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, and ANN GRIMES, acting director of Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford University: The Internet commands change. NCEW is showing leadership that goes beyond change. It's working to grasp the opportunities that exist to make a future for opinion journalism.

JOHN OPPEDAHL, former publisher, San Francisco Chronicle: This meeting was a real success in focusing on how the changes in institutional opinion journalism, at local TV stations and at newspapers, could affect U.S. democracy. It's an important question that has not been examined much.

There now is a plan to do specific research on the audiences for opinion journalism and to experiment at a number of editorial operations on new ways to editorialize. NCEW is now looking for partners to help do that. NCEW wants to deliver to publishers and station managers solid information that will help them plan for the future and leverage an existing asset they all have. And those at the meeting, with superb help from the Kettering Foundation, reaffirmed that institutional editorializing will continue to be a valuable component of the civic conversation in our democracy.

DAVID HOLWERK, editorial page editor, The Sacramento Bee: Most days, we tend to focus on just getting the damned opinion pages put together and out the door. So it was a real treat to sit with a bunch of smart people and discuss important things that we never take time to discuss: Why we do what we do? Does it really matter to the communities where we live and work? How can we use online media to do it better and make it more important to members of those communities? How do we talk about these subjects to publishers and corporate executives in ways that gain us a larger role in building successful opinion operations?

TOM WASELESKI, editorial page editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: When you come right down to it, we're talking about how to have conversations. We thought we were doing that with letters to the editor and our own editorials. But the interactivity of new technology enables us to do much more. The terrifying question for us, in an industry with some real survival issues, is how much, how fast, and at the expense of what? The pilot project, along with some specifically targeted consumer research, will give opinion editors not only a tool kit for new ways to keep the conversation going in their communities, but also guidance ford what people out there--both readers and Web visitors--want from us.