The first week of regional News Cube meetings have wrapped.

Meetings were held in Michigan and Illinois, where more than 30 attended a session in Springfield, Ill. and another 20 or so made it out in Kalamazoo, Mich., to visit with us on the content strategy for this year.

Chris Biondi, coordinator of online content and I conducted the meetings this week.

I'll take a few minutes today to share some feedback we received during the meetings to give folks a picture of how editors are reacting to the strategy and to give you a sense of what to expect during the meeting you attend.

NEW ALTERNATIVE STORY FORMATS

Editors are embracing the Community Service Journalism formats we're encouraging them to use. The formats are basic short profiles of local folks, like volunteers, religious leaders and other average residents. In Illinois, an editor at the Rockford Register Star mentioned that they have been doing something similar for years called Get To Know Me, a simple profile on people like teachers, business owners and students. The newspaper editor said it's great to have a home for when reporters meet new people and sources or when folks win awards.

And an editor at the Holland Sentinel during our Michigan visit this week came up with a few ways to build on to the formats we have provided, such as an alternative story format for presenting church mission stories. It's a format we'll consider building for all of our papers in the coming weeks.

PUBILC SERVICE JOURNALISM

The PSJ's, as we refer to them, seemed to resonate with the groups we met with. No surprise there. Public service journalism is why many of us chose this field.

One of the five formats that newspapers are provided as part of the program is "Your Question Answered," which encourages newspapers to answer reader questions in a short format. The feature resonated with one editor, who noted the number of calls newsrooms get from readers who are curious about things in town, making this standing feature easy to pull off.

The idea of the feature is to take a topical question like "how does the city decide what streets get snow plowed first" and break down the answer in chunks to readers. The feature invites readers to submit questions, but newsrooms are encouraged to pick up questions through calls to the newsroom and other avenues like folks who ask questions at council meetings.

BLOG, BLOG, BLOG

Staff and community blogging are big topics during News Cube meetings. A few good questions concerning blogging popped up.

• A publisher at our Illinois session asked if there were community blog topics that could be free and also good reads. A few ideas we threw out: A first-time school teacher, a local artist or a high school football player. Clearly the writer and their understanding of your goals for the community blog is what helps make it a success, but plenty of topics are out there that likely won't cost you anything and have the opportunity to add to your local journalism.

• Another editor asked a very simple question: Why blog? A simple answer: It offers our newsrooms a great avenue to empty notebooks of some of the content a reporter gets but can't do anything with, because the content doesn't fit into a story, such as a funny moment after a City Council meeting or something the coach said to a player after the game that you picked up. Blogs are just another format for getting information to readers.

• If blogs actually help grow page traffic was a big topic at one of the sessions. The answer is yes, but steps have to be taken to see success, such as promoting constantly in stories, placing the blogs in highly visible spots on your site, writing specific headlines and picking the right topics and updating consistently. There are examples in our company of papers that do this well and through our training program this year with each newspaper we'll be working on how to do this successfully.

• Getting to pick each other's brain is one of the real highlights of these meetings. That was the case in the blogging conversation where an assistant editor from the Galesburg, Ill., newspaper got to share his Lunch Gang blog with the audience. An editor from a larger daily spoke up and asked if she could steal the idea. We'll call that idea borrowing.

OTHER TOPICS

In addition to the News Cube strategies, we're updating folks on future development we have planned online, which has created lots of good conversation on topics like commenting and E-editions. The meetings are serving as a terrific platform for our editors to raise issues and questions on what we're positioning as top content goals for this year, as well as providing us valuable feedback going forward on projects currently in the works. Consider issues or ideas your newsroom has been discussing and bring them up at your scheduled meeting.

GOODIES TO GO

Publishers and editors all receive a bound copy of the GateHouse Newsroom Handbook, along with a schedule noting when training for the program will be coming to local newsrooms and a CD with Quark and InDesign files of the formats that are in the handbook.

THE WRAP

While we have only talked to a small percentage of the company so far, we're quite optimistic about what can be achieved this year through this program and extremely hopeful that our newsrooms will continue to develop and grow as reader needs and expectations of consuming content changes before us.

David Arkin is the executive director of the News & Interactive Division for GateHouse Media. Contact him at darkin@gatehousemedia.com.