The Post’s formidable brand isn’t politics alone, but, to resort to an overused phrase that once had real meaning – the “intersection of policy and politics.”

The Post brand was created in the mid-1960s, when its new managing editor (and later executive editor), Ben Bradlee, transformed the Post’s pokey, provincial Washington staff into an agile, probing team of correspondents that effortlessly toggled between policy and politics, often in the same article. Propelling this transformation were the big ideas of the 1960s: Cold-War strategizing, the civil rights revolution, the persistence of poverty in postwar America, renewing hollowed-out cities, landing a man on the Moon – just for starters.

It didn’t last forever. As big ideas shrank in size after the 1960s, the Post’s politics/policy brand lost some of its momentum and relevance. The vacuum in ideas in Washington was gradually but relentlessly filled by politics. The capital became Circus Maximus II, whose broad oval extended from Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street NW. The increasingly electronic, short-attention-span media was delighted by the circus, because it was less expensive to cover and most of it could be presented as heart-pumping horse races, with a sprinkling of sassy asides from the regulars in the grandstand and clubhouse.

On cable TV, whose growing popularity paralleled the triumph of politics, deep reporting was replaced by sound-bitten punditry, most of it supplied by consultants to the money-oiled Democratic and Republican campaign machines. (Two honorable exceptions to the cable circus are The Rachel Maddow Show and The Joe Scarborough Show, both of which try to negotiate that intersection of policy and politics.) To its credit, the Post clung at least to the spirit of the Bradlee policy/politics manual, and in sometimes path-breaking ways. The Post brand was diminished, but it still had value that could be weighed on a scale.

Now, sadly, Post Politics looks like a move to de-emphasize the Post’s honorable legacy and restructure its Washington coverage according to Circus Maximus II.

This downsizing of the Post brand has to delight the founders of Politico, John Harris and James VanderHei, both of whom left the Post to exploit more completely Washington’s seizure by total politics. Politico correspondents shuttle between the Capitol and White House on Pennsylvania Avenue and its ad salespeople troll the lobbyists’ offices on K Street and its environs. But the auguries for Circus Maximus II aren’t that promising. Big ideas are starting to come back.

This isn’t wishful thinking. Start with the evolution of one of the country’s most politicized issues – how to improve the education of children, particular those representing minorities. For the past several years, the No Child Left Behind law has been one of the hottest political debates in Washington. The debate continues, but the sound bites are being replaced by real discussion about how to better educate children. It’s happening because of the accumulating evidence that NCLB did not close the gap between the education of black and Hispanic students and others. There’s now space for policy ideas that seek to save the best of NCLB but add elements that engage the entire community not just teachers and what happens in the classroom.

Other big ideas are on the horizon:

• Health reform legislation will, because of how it was written, generate a steady stream of ideas to cut costs while also improving care. Rants against reform will lose their power as the nation is forced to get serious about health costs that, on a per-capital basis, are double and more those in other Western countries.
• The new Fiscal Reform Commission has a broad mandate to come up with serious proposals to reduce the national debt to sustainable levels. Sound bites on cable shows won’t cut it in the sobering debate that is already unfolding.
• Cities, towns and villages everywhere are struggling with the twin challenges of becoming more livable without going bankrupt. While this sounds like a local or state issue, the feds are intimately tied up to what happens in communities of all sizes as the consequence of federal stimulus funding.
• Energy policy has been a can kicked down the road since the first oil crisis in 1967. It’s a sound-bite favorite on cable. But the oil spout in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana is already prompting a serious national conversation about an energy strategy that goes beyond our present, overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels. “Drill, baby, drill” won’t shape this conversation.

By jamming its Washington coverage into the politics-as-a-horse-race oval of its Post Politics page, washingtonpost.com is poorly positioned to exploit the comeback of big ideas and re-establish the power of its brand. The handicapping headliners of Post Politics completely missed how libertarian Rand Paul, winner of the Kentucky Republican senatorial primary, boxed himself into a position outside the Civil Rights Act. Instead of camping out on Circus Maximus II, the Post should be planting its flag where Bradlee put it in the mid-1960s – at that intersection of policy and politics.

A model for doing just that exists right in the Post newsroom. Young correspondent Ezra Klein covered the long battle for health-care reform legislation in the style of an unbuttoned wonk with a mischievous sense of humor. His blog is refreshingly called “Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It.” But Klein’s blog doesn’t appear to be inspiring other Washington coverage in the Post, although the Post Politics page did make this recent stab at finding the policy-politics intersection (see below). Resigned Rep. Mark Souder should be grateful that his sexual escapade with his part-time staffer was interpreted as a policy initiative.

Today’s Post editors have Web tools to make policy-accented stories come alive in ways that were unavailable to the Post in the 1960s. The tools are built around what’s called “data visualization.” Huge globs of data about school performance, health care costs, etc., have been pouring into cyberspace for a decade or more. What’s new is that now these globs can be converted into visually useful information that can make policy debates as exciting as the World Championship Wrestling-type pundit square-offs on cable TV.

How data visualization can alter policy debates – for the better – was dramatically demonstrated during the closing days of the acrimonious congressional battle over health-care reform. GOP House Minority Leader – and Circus Maximus II ringmaster – John Boehner decided to show how impossibly complex the legislation was by portraying it in a PowerPoint diagram that was Rube Goldberg, or maybe the Pentagon, squared. But then reform advocates countered with real data visualization to show what the legislation would do, and not do. The graphical rebuttal required none of the bent arrows, dotted lines and curlicues of Boehner’s diagram.

You won’t find current innovations in data visualization on the Post Politics page. What you’ll find instead is a clunky, pre-21^st century guide to congressional action and dull “meet-you-member” bios of lawmakers. Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, in a glowing article on the debut of Post Politics, referred to the site’s “slick interactive” map of the status of 2010 congressional races. But the map doesn’t let the user do the most basic visual analysis of the races to see how the balance of power might change on Capitol Hill against different variables.

Instead of trying to out-Politico Politico, the Post should be using its website to mash together politics and policy with all the textual verve of the Post’s national staff of 40 years ago but with the added wizardry of today’s data visualization. If it did, its brand would once again shine brightly – at Circus Maximus II and beyond.

If you wanted to visualize the impact of the AOL-Time Warner merger, wouldn’t the result be something like this?

But much more important than image gimmickry is the value and integrity of AOL’s content, which is spread among 80-some sites. Can the reborn company create a mosaic whole that is greater than the sum of all those parts?

Some of the 80 sites are quite respectable, editorially. Like AOL Money & Finance, or the blog Engadget, or the new Politics Daily. They’re clearly run by pros. A few, like Mapquest, are struggling to stay competitive. Then there’s Netscape, once the No. 1 browser (before Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), which still has a ghostly presence in the AOL lineup.

But what I really wonder about are those blogs with the weird names and even weirder rationales for existence – like Lemondrop, Luxist and Holidash?

These three blogs, from my examination, are cheesy attempts at unholy marriages between editorial and advertising that could nullify the good things that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is doing to recreate AOL as a premium content provider. Armstrong has hired some strong editorial talent, including Saul Hansell, the New York Times telecommunications reporter who started the well-regarded Times technology blog Bits.

I’m not talking about the well-publicized efforts by the new AOL to maximize search engine optimization by encouraging bloggers to load their posts with keywords that Google and other search engines will sniff out. The theory is that AOL will attract more users and advertisers if its stories wind up with more prominent search placement. Boneheaded in isolation, but not necessarily a fatal compromise of editorial independence.

What’s unambiguously troubling is how AOL, well before its Nov. 10 spinoff, has been using some of its blogs to shamelessly hawk advertisers who buy sponsorships on the sites.

One of the most egregious example I saw involves Holidash, which landed Walmart as a sponsor for its “giveaways.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with advertisers sponsoring content. But the bright line is definitely crossed when a site starts boosting a sponsor. That’s exactly what Holidash did when it ran this post rating America’s biggest retailer far ahead of Whole Foods in cost savings for holiday food shopping.

The Luxist blog ran a rave review of the 2011 Cadillac CTS coupe (“Cadillac has proven itself capable of taking on Europe’s finest”). Cadillac is one of Luxist’s sponsors.

The unholy marriages go back at least a year – to when Lemondrop went to bed with Schick Wilkinson-Sword: “the one-month ‘Stocking Stuffers’ campaign, Lemondrop.com editors will create original content that integrates Schick’s brand with posts such as ‘Best & Worst Guy Gifts,’ ‘Dating Survival Tips During the Holidays’ and ‘Genius Gifts from the Drugstore,’” AOL bragged in a press release.

As editorial director of AOL’s new content management platform, seed.com, Hansell will be in charge of Lemondrop, Luxist, Holidash as well as other AOL content. Very quickly he has to break up the unholy marriages of editorial/advertising typified by what’s going on at Luxist, Holidash, Lemondrop and who knows what other sites. Otherwise, AOL will not only be spinning off the worst merger in corporate history, but also spinning into a whole new batch of trouble.

“If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those ‘breadcrumbs.’ What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of ‘us,’ the news suppliers, and not ‘them,’ the news consumers? I don’t hear from any of those consumers in this report.”

Alan D. Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, provides a good share of the small amount of rigorous, economic-centered thinking that’s gone into the journalism crisis, also gave a mostly scathing review to “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.”

Downie and Schudson come to their drastic recommendation of a “National Fund for Local News” using the kind of sleeves-rolled-up but shallow analysis that typically informs newspaper editorials on big issues (e.g., health care reform and the U.S. role in Afghanistan) A typical sentence from the report: “With appropriate safeguards, a Fund for Local News would play a significant role in the reconstruction of American journalism.” What are “appropriate” safeguards? What are the con’s as well as the pro’s of letting the federal government, through funding decisions that are made by appointed “national boards” and “state councils,” “play a significant role in the reconstruction of American journalism”?

Downie and Schudson focus, appropriately, on the threat of continued editorial staff downsizing to journalism’s “‘accountability reporting that often comes out of beat coverage and targets those who have power and influence in our lives—not only governmental bodies, but businesses and educational and cultural institutions.’” But creating a spider-web-like network of grant-dispensing boards sets the stage for all kinds of abuses that, ironically, would provide fodder for accountability reporting.

Missing from the Downie-Schudson report are the basic elements of critical thinking:

• Digging for causes instead of reacting to symptoms.
• Measuring as well as marshaling evidence.
• Recognizing all the stakeholders.
• Asking “why” questions.
• Testing conclusions and recommendations.

Perhaps it’s unfair to hammer the Downie-Schudson report too hard. It’s symptomatic of what passes for analysis of the crisis in American journalism. We get too much rhetoric. The rhetoric is often well phrased – after all, it’s usually written by journalists – but we don’t need more rhetoric, however polished it may be. What we need is more case-method and other critical examination. Journalist/teacher/consultant Jane Stevens pointed the way with her studies of three community sites – CapitolSeattle.com, QuincyNews.org and WestSeattleBlog.com. Stevens and her co-author Mark Poepsel, a University of Missouri School of Journalism PhD candidate, take a close look at what the sites are doing on the journalistic, community and revenue fronts. The studies, if they are expanded to other websites, may lead to a flexible business model that can be tailored to work in a variety of communities – without federal money being doled out by national and state boards packed with patronage appointees.

(Stevens, by the way, gives Newsweek a well-deserved whack for its recent superficial take on the future of community journalism, which came to optimistic conclusions, but for the wrong reasons.)

Maybe the Downie-Schudson report will provoke enough tough reactions – on top of Schaffer’s and Mutter’s – that, cumulatively, will prod journalism’s practitioners and thinkers finally to start thinking critically about a crisis that won’t be solved with rhetoric, no matter how elegantly and urgently it’s framed.

“…all medicine is local. And until a community confronts what goes on in its own population — to the point of actually seeking the data and engaging those who can solve the problem — nothing will change.”

The doctors examined 306 “Hospital Referral Regions” – which cluster hospitals used by most residents in their metro areas – and found that 74 of them met the doctors’ criteria for “more effective, lower-cost care.” Rich documentation about wide disparities in costs in hospital referral regions can be easily accessed at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. The data can be repurposed into charts and other easy-to-grasp visuals that pinpoint high costs at one or more hospitals and lower costs at other hospitals all within the same metro area. This should be the starting point for newspaper coverage helping people to locate one of the crucial drivers of runaway costs: the availability of doctor-owned care-referral centers.

But go to newspaper websites today, and you won’t find them helping their communities understand this economic calculus of health care. I recently browsed five sites in metro areas that have the highest cost care, and only one site – the Miami Herald — was even taking a stab at owning coverage of the issue.

What I found:

• Miami: It ranks highest among major cities in health-care costs. The Miami Herald got on top of the story when it was first published in the New England Journal of Medicine last February, and it’s also done these subsequent related stories: here, here, here and – two weeks ago – here and here. But despite its considerable, cumulative coverage, the Herald doesn’t have a special section on health care with comparison charts that would help make sense of the barrage of data on health quality and costs.
• Dallas: Its health-care costs are among the fastest-rising in the U.S. – three times as fast as San Diego’s, according to a New England Journal of Medicine analysis of regional data collected by the Dartmouth Atlas. The new head of the American Medical Association is J. James Rohack, a Texas cardiologist who is affiliated with Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, whose spending per Medicare patient is as much as 40 percent lower than hospitals in Dallas. A June 21 feature in the Dallas News on Rohack touched on this disparity. But there was no sidebar or subsequent story (that I could find) probing why Rohack’s hospital does so much better on costs.
• Columbus, Ohio: Hospital Medicare costs here are increasing at a rate well over the national average – 4.4 percent vs. 3.5 percent. The Columbus Dispatch has data banks on popular baby names and lottery sales, but nothing that I could find on hospital quality/costs.
• Charlotte, NC: It’s the same story here on hospital Medicare costs – they’re increasing at a higher-than-average 4.7 percent rate. But I couldn’t find any news about this trend in the Charlotte Observer. The Observer has done admirable special reports, including on the plight of Carolina meat workers, but nothing on hospitals quality/costs.
• East Long Island (Suffolk County): Per capita Medicare spending at hospitals here was $2,500 more than in metro San Francisco, adding $1 billion to the total cost of patient care from this New York suburb. I found nothing about this disparity in Newsday.

It bears repeating what the doctors wrote in their Aug. 13 New York Times op-ed:

“…all medicine is local. And until a community confronts what goes on in its own population — to the point of actually seeking the data and engaging those who can solve the problem — nothing will change.”

It’s not too late for newspapers to mobilize their websites to take the lead in putting democracy in action. They have the resources to do so, but do they have the cojones?

Who else can be the tribunes of the people at this historic moment?

The gray (screened) type is gone, thank goodness, but it has been replaced by type that, because of the limited way it’s used, produces an even grayer look that extends to the entire layout:

The new typeface is Georgia, a serif version of Verdana, which Microsoft commissioned early on for its online readability. Georgia, which was inspired by Times Roman, is fine, but not when, everywhere, it is uniformly presented in regular font.

“Gutenberg would be proud,” the Times presumptuously brags about its new Web typeface choice. But even Gutenberg used boldface and other typographical devices of contrast in his Bible, the first example of printing with movable type.

To achieve its hyper-cleanness, the redesigned LAT site often eliminates information that would be an important cue to the browsing user. In this strip of three homepage promos (below), the browser is not told that authoritative Hollywood staff writer Claudia Eller was the author of the first promoted piece.

The second promo is for the popular Column One feature, but who’s to know?

High up on the page on Monday, Aug. 17, was this headline:

The linked piece would surely have gotten more hits if browsing users knew it was written by Melissa Healy, the Washington-based Health section writer who specializes in articles on human behavior.

The site’s feature on “our new look” says it “better showcases the world-class journalism our newsroom produces around the clock.”

I wonder if the un-showcased Eller and Healy would agree.

The site has redesigned ads, but it’s not a good idea to format editorial promos in the same size as ads and then juxtapose the two, like here:

Navigation has definitely been improved through dynamic subsection tabbing that changes when the user’s cursor rolls over main headings like LOCAL, NATION, WORLD:

The redesign has earned plaudits from commenting users (“magnificent change! much more readable, and elegant.” “Oooh! Nice, very nice,” “MUCH BETTER”) but there have been dissents too. Stephen wrote on Aug. 12:

“At first glance, i didn’t like it. maybe it will grow on me. maybe what’s ‘under the hood’ is impressive, but the previous design was much more elegant and sophisticated….”

“Our work is not done,” online managing editor Artley and LA Times editor Russ Stanton blog on the site.

Maybe that means they’ll revisit some of work they’ve already done.

A final suggestion: To help users wrap their heads around all the news the LA Times serves up, the site should hire what I would call a “Web maitre d’,” who would, each day, in a one-minute video, summarize what’s featured – from the biggest to the quirkiest stories. Talented would-be presenters – we’re talking LA here – would be lining up at the Times’ Spring Street entrance for auditions. The overview would be delivered with a soupçon of drollery (no Daily Show stuff) – just enough to encourage users to keep coming back for more.

News about health-care reform is, obviously, all over the media, including newspaper websites, 24/7, but too much of it has a Washington dateline when, in fact, the issue is basically local. People seek care where they live, not on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue NW or on K Street NW in Washington. Most of the $2.2 trillion-plus in health spending is rung up within mostly compact triangles of doctor offices, hospitals and outpatient centers in thousands of communities.

In June and July, when Congress was grappling with five reform bills at the committee level, attention had to be on what was happening in Washington. But with Congress going on summer recess, the focus is shiftingto kitchen tables and town halls all over America.

Newspapers, with their still formidable local resources, should own this story as the locus shifts to their backyards. At a time when 63 percent of Americans say the overall health care issue is “hard to understand,” newspapers could make their websites the authoritative place for people to go for the A-B-C’s – how they would be affected personally, not as part of a statistical mashup that may or may not be accurate. Newspaper sites could become not only locally tailored information centers, but also help influence how reform will be shaped when Congress returns from recess. After all, Congress is made up of lawmakers who depend on votes from people who live in thousands of communities, all of which are covered – at least in theory – by local newspaper websites. But papers aren’t planting their flag in their own territory.

Yes, newspaper sites do features about local individuals and families that can’t get care they need because they’re not insured or are under-insured, or who have gone bankrupt because of catastrophic illnesses. But these publish-and-run stories amount to scattered, quickly fading pixels that don’t let users see the whole picture.

To cover a story that has such major and pervasive effect on every household, and which will be around for months, if not years, to come, newspaper sites should have a strategically developed, attractively designed and well-promoted special section on health care – and the emphasis should be local, local and again local.

Every newspaper site, no matter how modest, could be health care central for its community. A starting point could be comparing the cost of care at local hospitals. There is a wealth of published local data that newspapers could access free. One major source is the Health Care Intensity Index, produced by the Dartmouth (University) Atlas of Health Care, which compares Medicare-related costs – 22 percent of all health-care costs – among local hospitals and against the national median.

The Dartmouth Atlas offers Excel versions of its data, which means a newspaper site editor can, with just a few minutes’ work, show how local hospitals’ costs compare with other hospitals’. Here’s a chart I quickly produced comparing a selection of hospitals in Houston – which is in the high-cost range nationally – with the low-cost Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, MN:

The obvious question is why does the Mayo Clinic – whose health-care quality is rated among the highest in the country – spend far less per patient than most hospitals in metro Houston?

Editors at any local newspaper site could do any comparison – within the metro area, statewide or nationally, all within minutes.

More spending on care, especially in the form of expensive testing and elective surgery, doesn’t produce better outcomes, data shows. It would take a bit of shoe-leather reporting, but newspapers could find out why costs vary so widely within their metro area. Instead of just being passive platforms for rants, newspaper sites could invite (or, if necessary, arm-twist), local doctors, hospitals and outpatient centers to participate in live forums where they would explain and justify the disparities and answer user questions. The sites would provide the same platform for local small businesses and labor unions, insurers whose plans cover local residents, advocacy groups and – especially important – local members of Congress. Of course, community residents – insured, under-insured and un-insured – would be able to tell their stories and ask questions about contradictory claims.

Multiply all this content generated from the more than 3,400 hospital service areas in the country, and you’d have a powerful, instructive mosaic of health care as it is delivered and priced. You’d also have, very likely, hundreds of thousands of opinions – leavened by now easily accessed, locally driven facts and figures – on how much reform Americans want.

No longer would there be a vacuum that is now filled by the demagogues and naysayers who often make things up and get away with it because there’s so much confusion about the issue.

You’d have more – much more – than another Internet “conversation.” You’d have grassroots America, with the assistance of local newspapers, helping to shape the legislation that will ultimately emerge from Congress probably by the end of the year. But newspapers have to use their still-considerable local resources to exploit the untapped potential of the Web to turn talk into action.

Newspapers’ print world will probably be a quaint media niche by the end of the next decade. What will happen to newspaper websites – will they fade into the empty quarter of cyberspace?

After Tom makes his points, OJR editor Robert Niles jumps in and adds additional thoughts on how this episode ought to provide inspiration to news publishers trying to preserve and extend healthy relationships with their readers.]

The most surprising thing about the Washington Post’s pay-to-play fiasco was not the Jack Abramoff-worthy pitch (“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate. Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth….”), but that the Post was wasting its time on a brand-building project that ignored the potential firepower of its nine-million-user-strong website.

Could any brand building be more ridiculously behind the curve than salons at the home of the publisher? Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, was known for her Georgetown salons, but in-between those evenings she did things like hire Ben Bradlee to create a first-class newspaper, take the Post public but without the Graham family yielding corporate control to Wall Street, and, while the new public company’s financial future hung in the balance, pledge the Post’s fortune and sacred honor by standing solidly behind the initially risky Watergate coverage of young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Talk about brand building!

Weymouth’s first salon was to be about health care. The now-infamous promotional flier promised a “spirited” evening. But so what? There is “spirited” debate about health care all over the media 24/7. What the Post should be doing is creating a 21^st-century democratic salon where health care can move beyond debate to action. The salon should be on washingtonpost.com, and it should go way beyond creating a dead-end talkfest involving health care providers, congressional and administration officials and Post writers and editors.

The missing invitees at Weymouth’s salon were Americans who
1) don’t have health care,
2) don’t have enough to protect them from a major illness or
3) are well covered but whose health isn’t any better for that.

There are, according to some respected estimates, almost 46 million Americans without any health insurance . Add the other two categories, and you probably have a grand total of 100 million or more people who are squeezed in the health care crisis. Their documented stories of denied health services, bankruptcy from uncovered bills and treadmill treatment should count for at least as much as what a health industry CEO or member of Congress has to say.

Washingtonpost.com could build the online salon where those stories could be heard, and, more important, acted on. It could set up sub-sites in metro areas that cover a cross-section of all U.S. demographicsand are known for both high and low health care costs. The recent and widely referenced New Yorker article by Atul Gawande on how health care costs in McAllen, TX, far outpace costs in prevention-focused metro areas but leaves residents in worse shape could be a template for a countrywide examination of medical technology and physician entrepreneurialism run amok.

The goal of this online salon would be not just airing health care issues, but pinpointing what’s broken in the system and coming up with affordable ways to fix it.

This would require a washingtonpost.com committed to engagement, but, so far, that’s not part of the site’s mission. It seems more interested in adding bells and whistles, including trying to be funny, like in this embarrassingly inept political skit inspired by Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

An online salon about health care that reaches out to the millions of Americans who are uninsured, under-insured and wondering how much health their insurance has bought them wouldn’t produce too many laughs. But it might help prod Congress to pass legislation that would let the U.S. finally join all other industrialized nations in providing for universal coverage. That’s something that Katharine Weymouth’s salons, however good the food and wine might be, would never achieve.

[And now, OJR editor Robert Niles adds his thoughts:]

While I agree with what Tom’s written, I want to add a couple more points: First, let’s not dismiss the power of off-line events to reward, strength and ultimately expand online communities.

Offline meetings represent a powerful and significant development in the relationship between an individual and an online community. It’s the moment when a relationship goes from being casual to representing a more lasting commitment. People so inspired to be willing to travel to a physical space to meet in person with other members show by their action a commitment to the community far greater than simple browsing and posting the occasional comment.

These are individuals around whom you can build new initiatives, support far larger membership and create a critical mass than will make additional classes of advertisers and funders take notice. Online publications from BlogHer to New West to DailyKos have made offline events part of the business and promotional strategy and the Post, like other papers, would do well to consider their lead.

Second, let’s not overlook these offline events as potential sources of revenue, as well. Most folks might not be willing to pay for online content, but they are willing to pay to attend conferences. And sponsors are willing to pay to have their names and logos attached to events that attract their customers.

So how is this any different that what the Post proposed (then abandoned)? We’re talking about building extending a new publisher’s relationship with the public – not with a handful of big-money insiders. And doing it on the record – a record that will be enhanced by the reporting of hundreds, or, if you are fortunate, thousands of readers who take the next step in their relationship with you by attending.

If newspapers are to remain relevant in a newly competitive media marketplace, they must not be content simply to inform readers. That won’t help them stand out from the crowd of other information sources. They’ve got to provide information so engaging, so compelling, that it moves readers to action. An offline, physical gathering can be one of those acts. Engagement in the formation and execution of public policy can be another. (Heck, not to be too crass here, but pulling out the wallet and buying something from an advertiser ought to be another action, as well.)

Here’s the good news for the Post: People hated the salon idea.

Why is that good news for the Post?

If you don’t care about the Post and don’t care to have a relationship with it, you wouldn’t care who the Post publisher ate dinner with and how much she charged. The fact that so many people reacted like a jilted boyfriend to the Post’s plan demonstrated that people do care about the newspaper and want it to be in relation with them instead of K Street bigwigs. People want a Post that answers to them, not to the lobbyists.

Why not, then, give the people what they want?

But in this case the one size – large – is the right one. The metros’ problem is they don’t know how to exploit their size. For all their cutbacks, surviving metros still have considerable staff and other resources that could be mobilized to do what sweat-equity blogs and micro-sites can’t do nearly as well or at all.

A story crying out for attention is what’s behind America’s broken health-care system. Most health-care coverage comes out of Washington, but the real story of waste and profiteering is taking place in thousands of communities around the U.S. In its June 8-15 issue, the New Yorker zoomed in on health care in one community – McAllen, a city in southern Texas near the Rio Grande River border with Mexico whose metro area has a population of 750,000. The article, by Atul Gawande, said that in 2006, Medicare spent an average of $15,000 on each of its McAllen enrollees – twice the national average and well over the $12,000 wages of the average McAllen resident.

One big reason is that McAllen’s physicians are entrepreneurs as much as they are healers. One local hospital’s medical campus is packed with state-of-the-art health-care centers (specializing in surgery, heart cancer, imaging) owned by the hospital’s doctors.

Yet Gawande, a writer and also physician, wrote there was no evidence that this gold-plated care makes McAllen residents any healthier than people elsewhere. In fact, the outcome was just the opposite: “Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s.”

What’s especially fascinating about Gawande’s piece is that it’s not built mainly around statistics – the way the media usually cover health care. Its old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting – the kind that one-person and other small websites can’t and don’t usually try to do. But that’s exactly the reporting that metro newspapers, despite their shrinking staffs, still have the potential to do well. Size matters.

But first, metros should quit wasting resources trying to cover everything, and thereby serving up, every day, the same thin reportorial soup that satisfies no one. Leave local restaurants and related coverage to Yelp! Don’t try to compete with on the local-local news front where Web-ified weeklies and micro-sites have firmly planted their flags. And why should papers hire clever typists to review movies – like the bankrupt Minneapolis Star-Tribune ? Where a blog or micro does an especially good job on one aspect of community coverage – like Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Crime two sites cited by Potts — metros can partner with the site or just link to it with a Huffington Post-style promotion.

On Monday, June 8, the Miami Herald went public with a feature recognizing the role of community blogs. Typically for how newspapers fail to use the Web creatively, the Herald is just aggregating blogs without trying to promote the best ones — a la Huffington Post.

By shedding coverage that’s redundant in the market, the average metro should be able to re-deploy enough reporters and editors to do big, long-term projects with major local impact.

Health care, which consumes close to 20 percent of the gross domestic product, is an obvious place to begin. A refocused metro staff would starts its homework by gathering all the data pertinent to the local area (as Gawande did for McAllen), but then reporters would use their shoe leather to translate the often-eye-glazing metrics into compelling narratives populated by people impacted by the broken system – something that Gawande, with just two feet, wasn’t unable to do. The other day, I learned that a nephew of mine eloped with his girlfriend in part to become a beneficiary on her employer-provided health coverage. With the national jobless rate pushing above 10 percent and many small businesses scrapping their employee health coverage, I doubt my nephew is an anomaly. Imagine the stories that would pour in to a well-built, interactive metro website that chronicled the health care crisis so close up and personally?

Reuters reports that “medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years,” and that most of those driven into bankruptcy actually had insurance – but it wasn’t enough to cover costs that exceed overall inflation. Metros can repurpose that story in thousands of people-specific ways.

Newly deployed reporters would talk to local doctors who set up the mall-like health-care centers that Gawande says are a major cause of the super-high cost of care in places like McAllen. These stories, too, would generate a lot of interactivity with the community – pro and con, to be sure.

Not all the coverage would be negative. Gawande cites communities – Rochester, MN, home of the Mayo Clinic and Boulder, CO, among others – where health care hasn’t become a profit center and doctors are trying to forge care- as opposed to cost-driven treatment. Metros would talk to the patients in care-driven treatment to find out how they benefit. Interactive discussions would draw more patient response – and maybe entrepreneur-doctors defending the system.

This smarter coverage would generate more traffic and give metros a strong shot at re-establishing themselves as a dominant news medium in their communities. More than that, it might, if enough metros got on board, help force policy makers and legislators to confront the real reasons behind the health-care crisis.

Metros could use their new playbook to cover other long-term stories with high social impact, including all those under the umbrella of an economic/financial crisis that is likely to continue for many years. Right now metros do report-and-run stories on foreclosures and business closings, but they don’t use their resources to show how these events are reshaping entire neighborhoods and maybe the American dream

How is the $800 billion from the federal stimulus legislation being spent in each metro area? Who are there winners and losers, and why? How much waste, fraud and conflict of interest are occurring? Report-and-run stories won’t answer those questions.

Metros must become like Gulliver – not the shipwrecked Gulliver who came to his senses to discover he was ensnared by the six-inch-high Lilliputians, but the Gulliver who later outwitted his captors and escaped to freedom.

Gulliver got smart. Will the metros?

Yet so far they haven’t been creative enough to exploit the potential of having their stories turning up as links on the heavily-trafficked Google News homepage. In her recent testimony [PDF] at a Senate committee hearing on “The Future of Journalism,” Google Vice President for User Experience Marissa Mayer gave a virtual tutorial on how newspapers could do that.

She said:

“Publishers should not discount the simple and effective navigational elements the Web can offer. When a reader finishes an article online, it is the publication’s responsibility to answer the reader who asks, ‘What should I do next?’ Click on a related article or advertisement? Post a comment? Read earlier stories on the topic? Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users. Today, there are still many publications that don’t fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site.”

A browsing of Google News proves Mayer’s case conclusively. On May 20, the Google News homepage promoted news of California voters’ rejection of measures to close the $21 billion deficit in the state budget.

One of the links included a Los Angeles Times analysis. But the link leads to a page that gave searchers no reason to stay around and look at what else the smart and sprightly LAT website offers. With a little bit of code added to the linked page, the Times could have embedded an example or two of what has made the site so popular since ex-International Herald Tribune Web editor Meredith Artley took over as executive editor in 2007 – like this multimedia feature that was promoted from the Times homepage:

I’m sure “the return of distressed denim jeans” come-on, with a swatch of distressed denim, if it had been also promoted on the linked page would have prompted a lot of searchers to click on it, and – who knows? – maybe browse more LAT web pages. Some of those browsers would surely end up bookmarking the Times, putting them in the highly desirable category – especially for advertisers – of frequently returning visitors.

Every day, there are numerous other examples of newspapers not exploiting the links they get on Google, and thereby failing to convert the fast-clicking Web searcher into a leisurely, frequently returning browser of their sites.

To be blunt, what newspapers have to do is emulate the marketing savvy of the carnival. When you came to the freak show, you were greeted by spectacularly clothed, fast-talking barker. Standing next to the barker was the “bearded lady” or “wild man of Borneo” or some other bizarre creature – a tantalizing sampling of what was insidethe tent. Buy a ticket for 50 cents, and you could satisfy your socially incorrect curiosity.

Newspaper barkers would have an easier job than the carnival barker. They don’t have to sell tickets. But they do have to do a better job of selling their content.

But just how “strong” will Book World be online?

When the Los Angeles Times eliminated its free-standing print Sunday Book Review in 2008 as part of its nonstop cost-cutting, the section was reincarnated online as Books in the Living section of the Times website. In addition to reviews, book-sale reports and a literary calendar, Books features a blog called Jacket Copy. But the blog, with its multiple authors, lacks personality. Overall, the online Books isn’t capitalizing on the strengths of the Web – particularly community building – and it doesn’t seem to have preserved the critical authority that was a hallmark of the print Book Review. Browsing through the skimpy site, you get the feeling it’s produced on a shoestring. There is no Steve Wasserman or Digby Diehl – past editors of the Book Review – setting and executing high standards.

The Washington Post is not going through the same financial duress as the LA Times, which is a helpless appendage of the fast-sinking and bankrupt Tribune Co. But the migration from print to online life, whatever the circumstances, is always tricky.

The print Book World was distinguished by both its gravitas and sprightliness. Holding it in your hands was like eavesdropping at a literary salon through which passed the likes of Morris Dickstein, Dahlia Lithwick, Laura Miller and George Packer, not to mention section regulars like critic Jonathan Yardley and essayist Michael Dirda, both Pulitzer prize winners. The only thing missing was the well-stocked bar.

Happily, Yardley and Dirda will continue to appear in the online Book World. Strangely, though, the lustrous brand name “Book World” seems to have been dropped. The departmental logo is now just “Books.”

It’s too soon to make sweeping judgments about the online Book World (or Books), especially whether it will meet the same fate as the online version of the LA Times’ Book Review. But it is dismaying to see how dull the newly unveiled site is, even in its pupae form. Yardley and Dirda are there, thank goodness, but they’re barely promoted in 8-point type.

The blog Short Stack, created back in 2007, is now daily, but, like the similar LA Times blog, has multiple authors, which impedes it from developing a personality to which readers can relate and react. The blog also seems to be limited to one entry per day. That’s way too leisurely to grab users’ attention and get them to join in what is now basically a one-way conversation. Why not at least add a paragraph or two at the end that wraps up always plentiful literary and publishing news and gossip?

The Post – and the LA Times – could learn some lessons about creating an online book section from the Guardian in the UK. Its site is big and splashy, but has enough gravitas to do a “Top 10″ on books about Rome that includes Robert Graves’ “I Claudius.” The entire section draws loads of comments from users. (You have to wonder if some other newspapers that have eliminated or cut back on book coverage couldn’t learn from the Guardian too.)

For all their literary excellence, the print Book World and the Times’ Book Review weren’t suited for reader participation (beyond rationed letters to the editor). The medium was truly the message – a one-way message.

Kassia Krozser, founder and editor of the lively blog booksquare.com (“dissecting the book industry with love and skepticism”), said in a discussion on PBS’ News Hour last July: “What we’re getting online is, people are excited about books. They want to talk about books. And that’s really incredible….”

And how. Librarything.com, one of the earliest reader sites, claims 500,000 users. It recently sold a 40 percent stake to AbeBooks,com, which specializes in selling used, rare and out-of-print books

Fast-growing Shelfari.com last year completed funding whose investors included Amazon, the champion online bookseller.

Book World shouldn’t mimic sites like Librarything or Shelfari. But it now has a potential audience of 10 million unique visitors – more than 10 times the potential readership it had in the Post’s Sunday print edition.

What an exciting new chapter this could be in Book World’s life – if only the publishing and editorial bosses at the Post inspire it to be written.