Following is the combined transcript of Staci D. Kramer's several e-mail interviews with Bill Mitchell, Online Editor and Marketing Director at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., about the recent Poynter.org redesign.

Staci D. Kramer: Changes usually bring some comments but are you surprised by the response to the media news portion of the redesign?

Bill Mitchell: Yes and no. We went through milder versions of this reaction a couple of times before: First, when Jim joined Poynter in August 1999, and then when we introduced the January 2000 version of the site with the name changed from MediaGossip to MediaNews. Jim heard the same stuff, of course, and he's no stranger to beefs about a re-design. I'm sure he'll gladly recount some of the reaction to revisions of his personal site, Obscure Store.

Some people were pretty convinced we'd Poynterize Romenesko and ruin what he created. We got through that in two main ways: Jim kept improving the column, and his editors at Poynter have continued to respect his independence since the day he started.

This may be more detail than you want, but here's how it works day-to-day -- and has since the beginning: Jim posts live to the site throughout the day, alerting me and another editor at Poynter so we can read behind. We alert him on the rare occasion we find a typo or bad link, and he makes the change himself. We know Romenesko to be an extraordinarily careful reporter and writer, and this system has worked fine. On occasion, if something raises interesting issues about whether to post or not -- or how -- Jim gives me a call and we talk about it. Jim is a better judge of this than I am, but I can't think of a single occasion in three years that we've blocked something he wanted to say -- or insisted that he publish something he didn't want to. I also don't see any signs of self-censorship on his part.

As I said in the piece introducing the new site last week, we knew we'd be messing with a good thing. We had good reason. The site was unmanageable in its old form, both in terms of size and architecture. And despite the nostalgia for the good old format, we got complaints from people who couldn't find what they were looking for. We also got complaints about the absence of such basics as print or e-mail the page or the functionality to comment directly on specific articles.

We realized some of those issues were less of a concern for Romenesko-only users of the site, but they're not our sole constituency. We're trying to develop a site that works for them as well as everybody else. I knew we'd get complaints from the MediaNews-only people, but, yes, their reaction did exceed my expectations for grief.

SDK: How involved was Jim in the redesign?

BM: Jim isn't based in St. Petersburg, but I've done my best to keep him involved every step of the way. We've been talking on the phone about various mock-ups for a year or so. Again, best to check with him on this, but I don't think we've done anything with the new site over his objections. On the contrary, we made some significant changes based on his good suggestions. Initially, Jim was not inclined to enable feedback at the end of each item, so we altered the back end to make that optional on a story-by-story, item-by-item basis. A couple of days before launch, Jim said he'd like to use the feedback function afterall, so he turned it on. In retrospect, turning it on at least had the benefit of giving Jim's audience a way to complain more easily than ever before. Some of the criticism is a bit rabid, but we're hoping to learn from the suggestions.

We'll go through everything in more detail next week, but my sense so far is that the reaction falls into these categories:

1. good ideas that can be implemented reasonably quickly.
2. good ideas that make sense but will take time.
3. bad ideas.
4. rants rooted in fundamental objections that MediaNews is part of Poynter.

SDK: What kind of beta testing did you do?

BM: Early this year, we did formal testing with 15 or 16 people from varying backgrounds -- editor, designer, reporter, etc. -- over a couple of days. They told us plenty, some of it conflicting. I just went through my notes again. Among the issues: too many things on a page, insufficient hierarchy, font too small, unclear labels, etc.

We've also asked a variety of people to look in on our development server as we went along.

We got a range of reactions and did our best to go with the advice that made the most sense.

SDK: Why make such dramatic changes to the functionality of media news?

BM: The major changes include:

• Shifting of left rail items to Plus Items at the bottom of each day's collection.
• Adding site nav to the left rail.
• Making the name of the publication a live link beneath the headline.
• Enabling feedback on each item.
• Enabling print this page.
• Adding time of posting to each item.
• Shifting from liquid display to narrower width.
• The new font looks bigger on some screen, but the idea is to approximate
  what it was before.
• Better searchability and archiving, with each item -- and each day's Plus items -- listed as a separate article in the database.

The idea is to make the page easier to read and use, within a couple of constraints: it's a database-driven site that limits the differences in
format that are possible from one section to another, and it's part of the Poynter site. The trick is serving readers interested in the rest of Poynter as well as those who aren't. We're especially interested in suggestions how to address both of those constituencies.

More specifically, we invite practical advice on enabling readers to get a
faster sense of what's new at a glance. We've gotten several good ideas already, and welcome more. We've also gotten several good suggestions about the feedback set-up. (There have been some complaints that Letters -- received, reviewed and posted by Jim -- are missing. They're still there, listed in the right rail just under E-Mail Romenesko.) We'll be working on these issues and others this coming week.

SDK:  Can you give me some clues about the changes being considered? What's unchangeable, immovable?

BM: One way or another, the left rail items will return to the top of the page.

We've been looking at new mock-ups over the weekend and comparing notes with Jim. We'll be working on that this week, along with the other suggestions.

The feedback system clearly needs some fixes, and there are a bunch of things that we'll sort into what we can do now, what we can do later, what we won't do, etc.

SDK: Are you consider scaling back some of the Poynter presence on media news?

BM: Yes, that's among the options we're considering to get the left rail items back up top. We want to make it possible for readers to get more news, faster, before scrolling.

SDK: Why was the site designed around IE?

BM: Our stats show that 74% of our users are on IE, with 18 percent Netscape and eight percent other. The combination of our user base -- and the kind of development most enabled by IE -- led us to build a site that works best with IE. I've edited the box with the story to say: The site works with all browsers, but works best with IE.

SDK: Why do you have to create a personal page automatically as part of registration? Couldn't that be an option? How many personal pages have been created? Do you know how many are public?

BM: Registration automatically creates a personal page, but the user can set the page so only his/her name appears. We need to explain that better, and also take another look at how much info should be included in the default setting. Just checked registrations and we're at 1,671 as of 2 p eastern on Sunday. Some people appear to be posting a fair amount of into in addition to their e-mail address and have begun setting up news feeds and favorite links, etc. There's no way, at this point, for us to tell how many people have used the various tools enabled by the Personal Page.

I realize that some, maybe a lot of users will want no part of a personal page. They come for Romenesko or some other specific aspect of the site, and have no interest in becoming part of an online journalism community. That's fine. They can read the entire site without ever registering at all. The only time we seek registration -- and then only name and e-mail -- is if they choose to post feedback and use other tools where the functionality is linked to an individual in the database. Since Jim's Letters page continues to operate as it did before, MediaNews users who want no part of Poynter registration can operate just as they did before.

But we also believe there are journalists who are interested in the
possibilities created by a virtual community. If I'm reading a feedback comment and the poster has provided some information on his/her personal page, that enhances the experience. One of our major objectives is to make the site more interactive, and my hunch is the personal pages will play a significant role in that.