I hope you’ll give it a look.

So I open the local newspaper this morning, then cruise around news websites, and I see plenty of expanded coverage for the Olympics. But I don’t see those news outlets running columns covering what happened on ‘Idol’ and inviting readers to talk about it.

Why not? I thought the journalism industry was in the business of attracting readers. And that news execs are blowing millions on consultants and makeovers to reach younger readers. If there’s a contest going on in this country that’s attracting 27 million viewers, many of them teens and young adults, why wouldn’t the news industry want a piece of that action? Why leave it to morning radio shows and fan websites?

I’m not calling for eight-page special sections. But how much work would it take to assign an entertainment columnist to write a blog and print column with recaps, previews and analysis? Plus an invitation for readers to leave comments at the paper’s website?

Surely, some newspaper has figured this out. If you know of one, submit its link below.

“Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they’re there, and you’re not.”

The Times’ Eric Ulken (a former OJR staffer) constructed a keyword cloud using the 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2006 and 2002 speeches. The clouds, which give more visual weight to more frequently used words, allow readers to get a quick visual impression of the speech’s content.

Ulken used an online cloud generator to start, then narrowed that list to the top 50 words to build his custom clouds. “If I were a programmer, I’d have written a script to do this. Instead I used Excel to compute the point sizes and alphabetize the list,” Ulken wrote.

Clouds are often found on sites that make heavy use of tagging, such as Flickr. But the principle works on any leaden block of text that needs visual punch to grab readers online. As Ulken and the Times have shown.

The guides come in English, Chinese, Arabic and Persian — targeting countries like Iran, Zimbabwe, China and Saudi Arabia — places where bloggers have been subject to filtering, interrogation, torture and even imprisonment. Each guide has a specific audience in mind and outlines the steps a blogger can take to avoid identification and possible arrest.

The wiki format allows international bloggers to edit the guides to reflect a more accurate picture of the situation in their countries. Bloggers are invited to translate the guides to other languages in order to expand the project’s audience.

But one innovative feature of ESPN’s new home page drove me nuts: The story package links under “Spotlight,” under the main package in the left column, rotate from sport to sport. That left me playing the journalistic equivalent of “Whack A Mole,” trying to skim the package summaries fast enough to click through before the links rotated to the next sports’. ESPN does provide a moving circle graphic which lets you know visually how much time you have until the next rotation. But that just makes the reader feel like a game show contestant playing the lightning round.

The new blog is slated to debut Wednesday, Jan. 18.

I wanted to note that we’ll be tweaking our publishing schedule slightly with this new semester. We’ll be posting new feature articles to the site early Monday mornings, with a second article each week around noon on Thursdays. (Los Angeles time in both cases.)

If you’ve subscribed to our e-mail newsletter, you’ll be getting those story links in your in box on Monday and Friday mornings. And if you’ve not yet subscribed, why not try it? Our newsletter’s a great way to be notified whenever we have new feature articles on the site.

After a little time off, Newswriting.com has returned with a new look and a broader mission. In addition to all the original popular features, the site now features a Front Page column that focuses on the challenges of news coverage in a rapidly changing environment: Who’s doing great work? Who’s doing questionable work? Which changes are good for us? Which ones endanger our profession?

The current Front Page column offers three recent examples of what a simple name change can do: Infinity’s decision to become CBS Radio, WIBA-FM’s decision to sell its newsroom’s naming rights to a bank, and ABC’s reborn Nightline, where everything has changed, except the name!

I hope you’ll find the new Newswriting.com useful and fun, and I hope you’ll get in touch to offer comments, suggestions, opinions, or to propose new topics or a guest column. I also hope you’ll spread the word. Also, please feel free to link to the site.

“We don’t wear makeup. We don’t worry (too much) about wardrobe,” Times editor Mike Riley wrote in an e-mail. “We’re fancy ourselves the anti-TV. We want to connect. We want to engage. We want to be interactive. That said, we have brought in some TV folks to talk about their trade to help us get a baseline on the industry, and we have used an acting coach, mostly to help us get comfortable in front of a camera. (He’s been terrific, by the way.) For most news folks, as you know, video is an unnatural act. We hope we can find a way to make online video sync with the paper’s newsgathering, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t.”

TimesCast plays weekdays at 3:30 p.m. (ET) and uses Macromedia Flash to allow viewers to click on the video itself to read stories, view additional images or leave comments. There’s not much source video, instead, the focus remains on the newsreader. Which makes the broadcast feel a bit like a podcast, but one where you can see the speaker.

Riley wrote that cost shouldn’t provide a barrier to other newsrooms looking to try something similar to reach broadband-enabled younger Web users.

“It actually doesn’t cost much to get in the game as far as the digital equipment goes (we went fairly high end, though). The real cost is in staffers’ time, and for us that translates largely into the multimedia editor, a script writer, a graphic artist, the news editors contributing items, and the TimesCasters. So those costs are well-dispersed, which makes it a more feasible project.

“So I don’t think cost is the barrier. I think fear is, namely the fear of taking a risk, trying something new, venturing into a new medium, and facing the fact that the experiment could fail. But what we’ll learn, even from failure, outweighs the costs.”