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Earlier today I and a lot of other folks got an email from Vikki Porter, who's leading a Knight Digital Media Center conference for editorial page editors. "We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can't meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea."

My snarky reply was: "Yes, they do come back. And that's why Google's current market cap is 140.73 Billion USD." I refrained from mentioning McClatchy's plummeting valuation.

Snarky, but serious: Google has built an empire on sending people elsewhere while many newspaper editors seem to be living in the 1960s.

Get this point. It's a network, not just another distribution channel. Being part of it means linking and referring.

If my memory serves, I spoke twice at meetings of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in the mid-1990s, once in Madison, Wis., and once in San Antonio, Tex., about the opportunity that the online venue was presenting for a broader and deeper social conversation.

Of all the mini-disciplines within journalism, the opinion and community forum leadership role of the "editorial page" should be a natural fit with the conversational strengths of the Internet. And yet many editorial page editors seem utterly lost. Sad.

Mallary Jean Tenore has a piece at Poynter.org titled Journalists Develop, Dismiss Digital Identities that includes the predictable "other side" in which a luddite just doesn't have the time.

In this case the luddite happens to be the "editor/opinion pages" of the Houston Chronicle. That's sad, because it's another example of failure to perceive opportunity.

"Digital identity" is just plain identity. Either people know who you are and what you stand for, or they don't.

The Internet isn't some fringe thing. Every day, more people use the Internet than read daily newspapers. If you want fringe, take a look at newspaper editorial pages, read by a tiny minority. If you want enhance the marketplace of civic conversation, go where the people are and show some leadership.

Tenore links to a (pirated) column by the editor, James Gibbons, that has a puzzling line: "I find that most blogs lack the elegance, wit and insight one looks for in magazine commentary and editorial pages in their ideal state." Isn't it true that most of everything fails to measure up to the ideal? That's Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." I wonder if newspaper editorial pages can claim to beat that average.

In an op-ed for the big paper on the left coast, journalism professor Michael Skube complains that "the blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined."

"One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more," he writes.

One does? Perhaps one gets such an uneasy sense from not reading the blogs about which one is opining. Or from not writing what actually gets published.

I have to wonder whether the Los Angeles Times is playing the troll or the fool in this little operetta. I'm not sure which is worse. We all would be best served by journalism that aims to provide light and not merely heat, and that applies to the op-ed page.

See also:

Jay Rosen
Dan Gillmor
Ed Cone, from 2005
Paul "the Real Paul" Jones

Update: A couple of midafternoon additions move this forward a bit. CBS Public Eye's Matthew Felling points out Skube's "selective quoting'; The Telegraph's Shane Richmond defends Jay Rosen's stiletto jab at Skube, and Jay Rosen launches a crowdsourced effort to create a response aimed at educating the readers of LATimes.com, and maybe even a journalism professor here and there.

Fascinating and fast-moving.

As the bloodbath continues at America's big newspapers, name-brand columnists, movie and music reviewers are at the head of the line of those being thrown overboard. At my alma mater in the north, the Star Tribune, 25 percent of the news department and 40 percent of the editorial page are getting the axe. Many old friends are on that list.

Perhaps the cuts are being made in the wrong place. Instead of cutting staff, I propose cutting the editorial page -- the actual printed artifact, the thing that consumes trees, gasoline and oil, and clogs landfills. Send it the way of the dinosaurs, along with the stock listings, bridge column and TV grid. Save the newsprint, save the staff.

We need more intelligent discussion of civic affairs, not less. But killing trees and creating recycling problems is not the way to do it.

Let's say you're an editorial page editor. What could you do?

• Focus your daily energies on the Internet. Liberated from the need to feed the daily print beast, you could be the first editorial page editor to actually succeed on the Web.
• Focus on leading productive and informative conversations. That means post-response-response. A loop. Fast.
• Build a community of thoughtful participants. Recruit heavily in the community. This is the blooming of the op-ed function.
• If your "editorials" spark no conversation, change your topics, your style, or your writers. Or all three.
• Lose the deadwood syndicated crap (does anybody under the age of 70 actually read George Will?) and the hatemongers (Ann Coulter). Let 'em blog on Myspace and see how far they get.
• Give us more editorial cartoons. And Flash animations.
• Learn from the Guardian.
• Once a week, on Saturday or Sunday, pull the best of the Web, especially the community contributions, into a print section. Add supporting material and new conversation starters for the next week. Make it worth reading, and worth keeping around until it's all read.

While sitting under yet another a CNN Airport Channel monitor the other day, I listened to Lou Dobbs on one of his rants against illegal immigrants, which surely everyone knows is code language for Mexicans. As I listened to him exploit xenophobia for ratings points and book sales, I thought about Hitler.

But I decided I would not cross the line drawn by Godwin's Law. Not going there.

As it turns out, Dobbs galloped right across that line, accusing advocates for illegal immigrants of employing propaganda techniques employed by Nazi Germany. Pot, meet kettle.

Meanwhile, an Indiana University research study finds propaganda techniques in the rants from Bill O'Reilly on the Fox channel: "The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini."

The study says O'Reilly uses name-calling more than once every seven seconds on the average, and also is a heavy user of other propaganda techniques such as glittering generalities, card stacking, bandwagon, plain-folks, transfer and testimonials.

None of this says anything good about human nature, or Dobbs, or O'Reilly, but it does suggest Godwin was right about more than discussion threads on Usenet.

More fuel on the fire: Writing for the Nation, Eric Alterman asks if it's "time to abolish the editorial page."