We don't endorse, and we like it that way: framing, not dictating, the conversation.

"It's our duty." "It's a tradition." "The public finds the endorsements useful."

Believe me, I know the arguments in favor of endorsing political candidates and have echoed them many times. So why did the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota, decide not to endorse candidates in 2006?

Two main reasons: First, we thought the costs of endorsing had come to outweigh the benefits. Second, we thought we could serve our readers better by taking another approach, which I'll explain below.

Decades ago, newspapers were most Americans' major source of national information, and editorial-board members--who steeped themselves in current events--were privy to much more of that information than were most readers. So, the board members rightly could claim that their candidate interviews and knowledge of civic life gave them "special information" that made election endorsements worthwhile.

That has changed, especially in the matter of national elections. Today, the Internet, C-SPAN, twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news, and other outlets give every American access to huge amounts of information.

As a result, local newspapers' national endorsements have come to matter less and less, as most readers make up their minds without an editorial board's help.

But what about local elections? A case can be made that editorial boards still have access to "special information" about local candidates, given that the board members interview candidates in person.

This premium on information has shrunk in recent years, however, as blogs, talk radio, and other information outlets have arisen.

Then there's the cost of making local endorsements: A cost measured in part by an erosion of civic goodwill.

There are reasons why people vote in private. There are reasons why even senators and congressmen vote in private on Election Day, as opposed to their public votes on the House and Senate floors.

One reason is that voting for or against a person is a uniquely personal event, so that there's something unseemly about announcing one's vote in public.

Or announcing one's candidate endorsement in public, the Herald editorial board came to believe. The endorsement brands the paper as a supporter of the "winner" while delivering a very public, very personal, don't-vote-for-this-candidate slap to the "loser".

Mind you, we know full well that angering or offending readers on occasion is part of an editorial page's job. Daily, we take strong stands on every other issue under the Dakota sun, including ballot questions (as opposed to candidates).

But where candidate endorsements are concerned, we felt more readers were reacting by sneering or by clenching their teeth ("Who are you to tell me who to vote for?", etc.) than by nodding or shaking their heads.

In any event, we thought we'd try something new: Transcripts.

The Herald editorial board interviewed thirty-five candidates for local and state offices in the fall of 2006. But rather than turning that massive amount of labor into brief endorsements--a process, as you know, in which almost all of the interview material gets lost--we transcribed the interviews and posted them online.

That way, we tried to give readers as much information with which to make decisions as editorial board members typically enjoy. And we hoped to advance a progressive development in media, which is to put the focus on readers rather than the newspaper staff.

Did it work? I'd summarize the response this way: Feedback from journalists was skeptical; feedback from the public was pretty good.

Mind you, we didn't get a lot of feedback in either case, so--as happens so often in newspapering--we're still navigating though a fog.

But up here in the pilot house, my instinct tells me the project worked.

The transcriptions were a popular (if very labor-intensive) service that I'm sure we'll repeat in '08. I didn't miss writing up the endorsements and didn't sense that voters missed reading them, either. I was glad to help launch something creative and new.

Now, to bring the same method to bear on another edit-page perennial: the holiday editorial. But that might be an even tougher old chestnut to crack!

Tom Dennis edits the Grand Forks Herald editorial page. E-mail [e-mail]