Jon Donley is the editor of Nola.com, the online presence of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. His site has experienced steady growth among younger readers, as evidenced by the fact that roughly 29 percent of Nola.com's readers are between 18 and 24, while the newspaper's share of that age group is only 12 percent. Donley answered this Q&A via e-mail.

Q: What explains your success attracting youth to Nola.com?

Jon Donley: Well, it helps to have a test audience of seven teenagers at home....

OK, the short answer is that youth are attracted to our forums' audience-driven content. Wherever possible, we use Times-Picayune content -- in prep football, for example -- as the context to stir discussion in the related forum. We make a big deal out of Friday night football, including continually updated scores and a relationship with a television station that includes a poll of the week and a legendary local coach who contributes to our prep football forum. This was likely the hook for most of our young users, given the importance of football in our area.

Football is a no-brainer, and season-by-season, we apply that to other sports that the newspaper covers. Even in the off-season now, our prep football and prep basketball forums are enjoying high traffic.

But we go beyond that to reach out to extracurricular activities that the newspaper does not cover...or covers only briefly. There's plenty of virgin territory out there -- sports, clubs and activities whose participants feel disenfranchised by newspapers. (No knock on papers, of course?that's just a matter of juggling space and priorities. Online we have unlimited space to give every group some turf.)

"Any newspaper editor who deals with the public has a pile of complaints in his inbox from groups that feel they're getting passed over. These complaints are often valid?such groups are the victim of small news holes and staffing limitations. Give them their turf online. " -- Jon Donley

The best example of this is high school bands, a topic that resonates with me as a band geek and ex-Army musician. Here in New Orleans, where Southern and Grambling come to wage war in the Battle of the Bands (upon which the movie "Drumline" was based), bands are active year-round, and The Band is almost a religion. Two things you should know about band members: they're all about pride, and universally they feel underappreciated. For good reason. Summer band practice is often longer and more grueling than football practice, musical skills require years of honing, and the band gets no respect. Football makes the front page every week during the season. The newspaper may do a feature on a band every year or so, but in general, even in this musical city, the kids are ignored in print. We created a high school band forum that was so popular that eventually we had to spin off into drill teams, dance teams, military-style and show bands. When we began running online contests to determine the Readers Choice best bands in the New Orleans area, traffic to the band areas easily blew away prep football traffic.

In season, under-covered activities such as wrestling, soccer, cheerleading, volleyball, softball and others bring high traffic. Generally we use the prep football section to help drive initial traffic to these new features, since most kids are interested in football. Our site has only been around for about 5 1/2 years, but we know -- anecdotally at least -- that kids who got turned on to these types of features in high school stayed with NOLA as they moved on to LSU, Tulane or other colleges that we cover in a similar fashion.

Q: Do you consider yourselves an online newspaper Web site per se?  You are the online presence for the Times-Picayune and yet you've got the Nola.com URL, which seems to be saying you consider yourselves separate from the paper?

JD: No, we are not an online newspaper, although we are the exclusive Internet presence for Times-Picayune content, and consider that content crucial. We are a legally separate company from the newspaper, although eventually we are both owned by the Newhouse family. We are the local affiliate of Advance Internet. The Times-Picayune is part of Advance Publishing. The corporation made a strategic decision years ago to run Web sites in markets where it owned newspapers, but to keep the sites legally and operationally separate from the papers. In some cases, this meant actually removing existing sites from control of the papers. The idea was to allow the Web sites freedom to develop outside the newspaper box, on both the business and editorial sides. We do work with the paper continually, as the credibility of the newspaper gives us a great foundation and advantage.

But many of the things we do that get the highest traffic are things that might not have occurred in a newspaper environment, or at least not as quickly. Many in-house newspaper sites agonize over forums, for example. The idea of allowing readers to create content that's not passed through an editor is foreign to the newspaper culture. (I'm a former op-ed editor, so I'm speaking from experience.) The Times-Picayune has 150 years of reputation and credibility to safeguard. As a separate entity that is not presenting itself as an online version of the newspaper, we have a bit more leeway to experiment and go with the flow of the Internet.

Q: What advice would you have to other newspaper Web sites that haven?t had much luck attracting young readers?

JD: My advice is look for communities of young people who feel ignored by the print product. Any newspaper editor who deals with the public has a pile of complaints in his inbox from groups that feel they're getting passed over. These complaints are often valid?such groups are the victim of small news holes and staffing limitations. Give them their turf online. If possible, let them build the content day to day. And keep it local. Prepackaged youth content has never worked for us . . . there are just too many much better niche sites out there on the Internet. What we can do better than anyone else is provide a local online community, in context of local content.

Q: Is the luck you've had attracting youth to Nola.com helping attract them at the same time to the paper?

"We can't stuff the worms back in the can. If we don't seriously work on ways to adapt and insert our corps of professional journalists into this new world in a way that pays, it's going to leave us behind. There is still time for this to happen." -- Jon Donley

JD: I don't have the answer to that. Because of our separate operations and goals, it's not something I focus on. We know (again anecdotally) that when youngsters become regular users of our site, they read online newspaper content. But how that translates into hard copy, I have no idea.

Q: Why do you think younger readers (18-30) don?t read papers or their Web sites much? What can we do differently? Or is the news itself just a turn off?

JD: I don't believe the news itself is a turnoff. The medium itself is an issue, though. My home test market and their friends tend to live online, and they do tend to check out breaking news via CNN or Fox. But they focus on news that's either so compelling they just have to click it?or specifically on news of interest to them.

The trap that online newspapers run into is presenting sites that mirror the print product too faithfully. Instead of racing ahead of the newspaper, providing breaking news and the opportunity to interact with it, such sites run a content package that was a day old by the time it hit the racks. And now even older on the Web site. If newspapers themselves are having trouble hitting this age group, why would you think that the same recipe, served up online as leftovers, would fare any better?

Q: The newspaper industry thought online was going to be the secret sauce that would attract the next generation of readers -- which has just failed to develop a newspaper habit like their parents did.  It looks like that hasn?t worked out -- most young readers aren't flocking to newspapers sites. What do you think this failure to attract young readers to news websites means for the future of newspaper business?

JD: 'm not sure I agree with half of those premises. As an editor, developer, consultant or interested bystander, I've listened to Web strategy debates at a number of newspapers, and have heard many different rationales for diving into the Web. Some saw the Internet as the vehicle that would replace newspapers?others saw it as a vehicle to slow, or reverse, the decline of newspapers by brand extension. I do not believe, and never believed, that the Web is going to deliver the newspaper industry?or the news industry overall (it's not just newspapers that are facing decline). I believe that the news industry as a whole is going to survive only by making itself relevant to the real-world habits of readers. The time is past when the high priests of journalism can get away with spoon-feeding the public "what it needs to know" as opposed to "what it wants to know." The Internet has liberated readers to get information from whatever source they like...and also to be an active participant in that growing community pool of information. We can't stuff the worms back in the can. If we don't seriously work on ways to adapt and insert our corps of professional journalists into this new world in a way that pays, it's going to leave us behind. There is still time for this to happen.