I read the NYT Sat, op ed page last night. Every piece strikes a note of urgency, as if lives depend on how effective the media are in raising awareness, advocating relief, spotlighting distress.

Gail Collins’ piece about McCain’s compassion tour—one of the best I’ve read by her—argues that he’s less intelligible than Bush and hard of feeling, if nothing else. The court rejects workers’ right to seek compensation for wage disparities, and McCain opposes a bill designed to give women relief.

Sichan Siv, a Cambodian-American diplomat I knew nothing about until now, writes of his escape from the killing fields, his return home for the first time to find that Cambodia today reminds him of Cambodia just before the Khmer Rouge took power—divided between rich and poor, fearful, restless. God help us.

Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug who helped create the “green revolution” strains of wheat that were immune to stem rust, the most feared of all wheat diseases, says a more virulent form of the fungus is back and threatens deeper hunger and chaos than the present food crisis. He writes that the Bush administration reversed funding of agricultural science, and has closed down our worldwide research into new strains that could resist stem rust.

Bob Herbert writes that “you can almost feel the air rushing out of the Obama phenomenon.” He’s shown “a strange reluctance to fight”. Herbert urges him to hit what he’s going to do on jobs and the economy like a jackhammer.

I’ve been thinking about why traditional media seems increasingly flat, remote, deenergized, and how much journalism now is indeed about conversation (Jonathan Alterman’s phrase). We don’t just have to do good reporting and thinking, we have to disseminate it in a way that literally sucks people into the conversation, we have to transform our one way reporting into an exchange.

I know the answer is how we present ourselves on the Internet. I see the limitations now of a newspaper and any website that just resembles a newspaper more than I ever have before, although I also believe the convenings we’re doing are important, like that of black, Hispanic and Asian(Vietnamese) media leaders in New Orleans.

All of which is to say—we’ve got to let people post directly on our site to create more of a 24/7 news cycle; we’ve got to turn our site from a web-based newspaper into a hub for exchange; we’ve each got to blog as well as report and
produce video. By blogs I don’t mean just hyperventilated opinions, but thoughts that could be honed through collective consideration into ideas and insights.