Thundering gets replaced by bafflegab.

Modern-day crusaders are the worst enemies of editorial pages.

It was probably inevitable.

After many years of newspapers deliberately defanging their editorial pages for fear of offending somebody, it has come to the attention of the industry's heavy thinkers that today's newspapers don't say much of anything.

You might think this would lead to a renaissance of editorial pages. After all, every community has issues that call for strong positions to be taken, issues that require leadership be exercised. Where better to do these things than on the editorial pages, where actual people are paid actual dollars to investigate and form opinions, where the old-time traditional thunderings for justice take place?

You would be wrong.

In fact, the greatest proponents of modern-day crusading are the worst enemies of editorial pages. As far as fads are concerned, cluttering the news sections with opinion runs only slightly ahead of gelding or eliminating the editorial page.

To be perfectly in tune with current thinking, a newspaper should do the following whenever it feels the need to make a point:

* It should convene a panel of readers who will tell the newspaper what problems exist and how to handle them. This is especially helpful to newspapers that don't bother to send reporters out to find out what the hell is going on. It is also less expensive.

* It must then put together a continuing board, consisting of every interest group in sight, to assure that the direction of coverage has the appropriate spin.

* It must write a convincing proposal on the subject chosen, in fullest academic bafflegab, so as to impress some foundation or other to pay the newspaper to cover what it should have been covering all along. This gets really interesting when the foundation itself turns out to have been a Ponzi scheme, thus costing the newspaper great gobs of credibility when another newspaper exposes the foundation as a pack of thieves.

* It is obliged then to put every stupefying word of what is found out into the newspapers, slaying great forests to little effect. Generally, what is learned is something that should have been self-evident if the newspaper had been doing its job in the first place.

Everybody likes bold new ideas, especially those comfy ones that are neither bold nor new. What's not to like about something that generates all that grant money? It gets even more attractive when the opportunity to lay off all those pesky editorial writers(*) gets thrown in, along with the ability to crusade while laying all the responsibility on the readers.

Compared to realistically staffing and funding editorial pages and giving them the freedom to say something important, the new procedure seems like a bargain.

At least until readers figure out that they can talk to themselves without your help.

* The reference to "pesky editorial writers" describes writers who drive their publishers nuts with their dedication to truth, justice, and the American way, not the distinguished dead bodies who are traditionally dumped on editorial pages.

NCEW member Richard Aregood is editorial page editor of The Star-Ledger in Newark, NJ.