News-Record.com

As soon as he's finished with a couple of stories, Lex Alexander will begin designing and building our new Web presence fulltime following the open source journalism model.

His report was comprehensive, and we want to do much of it. We asked him to focus first on bringing down the artificial barriers separating the newspaper from readers. His initial efforts will be to develop interactivity, forums, communities of place and of interest. He's going to help us develop more staff and reader blogs, and bring on more citizen content, stories and photos. We're looking at many other sites to learn. I like the OhMyNews model. We'll see.

We're also exploring ways the newspaper and the online world can complement each other, feeding content to each other and playing to the strengths of each.

There are some recommendations we can do quickly. Others will await our new publishing system, scheduled for launch in mid-February. Still others will require navigating through the treacherous waters of business imperatives. Among others, we have a daily newspaper to put out.

We had an interesting discussion about how much to reveal here. The traditional model -- don't tell until you launch -- had proponents. But under the idea that we're pursuing revolution, not evolution, we've decided to put it out when we know it, and even when we don't know it. That probably means we'll over-promise and certainly means we'll make mistakes. Stuff happens. And stuff can be fixed and improved.

We know you have high expectations. So do we.

So, Lex, get those stories finished and get started!