The plan was to visit The Bakersfield Californian to talk about their community journalism and niche publications, but I ended up learning just as much about their traditional newsroom.

Bakersfield has been a forerunner in community journalism since 2004 when it launched The Northwest Voice, a twice-monthly, home-delivered tabloid-sized newspaper filled with words and pictures from Northwest Bakersfield residents. Since then, the company has added a Southwest Voice and Mas, a weekly magazine focused on the style, culture and issues of Hispanics living in Kern County.

All three products are produced by Mercado Nuevo(New Market), a subsidiary of The Bakersfield Californian. Mercado Nuevo is also responsible for Bakotopia.com, an apparently widely popular local social networking site. In total, Mercado employs 20.

The publications validate the changing nature of the greater Bakersfield area, which has a significant Hispanic population. But the growing region also has a lot of time-starved readers who want hyper-local news of their neighborhoods delivered in a different way from the traditional newspaper. So the Voices are filled with stories about people, schools, churches and community events.

There are photos of newborns, weddings and first birthdays, letters to the editor and blog posts. Each Voice has a companion Web site. The cover stories are written by Voice editors (one for each edition) and the rest of the content is all community generated.

The slick Mas magazine is geared toward bilingual residents who live within Bakersfield proper and earn above $60,000 a year. Readers are not your stereotypical migrant workers, but instead are families who live in dual cultures. Mas also contains citizen content, but in addition to an editor has two staff reporters.

In total, the Voices have hit the break-even point for profitability, ahead of goal. Mas is getting there. All three products are solely supported through advertising.

Beyond the cultural shifts reflected in the content, the Voices and Mas also represent a cultural shift in the news operation. Mercado Nuevo is completely independent from the traditional newsroom.

In fact, its offices are a block away from the main operation. And Mas and Voice editors believe it has to be that way. In fact, you'll find very few people who believe the niche products could have been created in the same way had they come out of the traditional newsroom.

Even Executive Editor Mike Jenner agrees that the autonomy has been beneficial for Mas and the Voices. Still, his professional ego thinks they could have done it just fine within the newsroom.

And that's the lesson for tradition-bound editors and reporters. With the utmost professional respect, Voice and Mas editors told me there is resistance to change in the main Bakersfield newsroom. Rather than "leading a conversation" in the community, Mas and Voice editors "listen to what the community is saying."

Community journalism is about giving average people a voice and resisting the urge to change what they say and how they say it. In professional newsrooms, the emphasis is on editing and generating original content.

Interestingly, several of the niche editors come out of the traditional newsroom. Olivia Garcia, managing editor for Mas, the Voices and Bakotopia, covered the county beat and minority communities for the main Californian newsroom. Maria Machuca, editor of the Northwest Voice, used to cover crime and social services for The Californian. Delia Carson, general manager for Mercado Nuevo, comes from a traditional newspaper advertising background.

They understand how traditional newsrooms work.

"People are emotionally attached to these papers," says Southwest Voice Editor Lauren Helper. "They use strong words like 'I love the paper.' They don't use those words with the regular paper. They don't feel like there's a big distance between us (as editors) like in traditional newsrooms."

I asked Carson what kind of feedback they get from The Californian's reporters and editors. It's mixed. Some dismiss the Voices without ever having read them. Others are more supportive. And while the two operations don't meet regularly or systematically share story ideas, there is a kind of organic way staffers send ideas back and forth that don't fit their particular demographics.

"We (journalists) often believe we know what the community needs, but that's not the case when you're working with these kinds of products," Carson says. Readers are "part of something here."

I asked the editors to give traditional newsrooms some advice on how to start community journalism products.

1. Listen to your community. Don't talk over them.

2. Move quickly with ideas. If a particular feature or strategy isn't working, dump it and try something else. Responsiveness is important.

3. Create a good business plan.

4. Don't be afraid to look for creative, nontraditional staffers who can break down walls.

5. Go independent. "Don't be a stepchild to the main newsroom. You need freedom."

As I said at the top of this post, I also learned something about the traditional Californian newsroom on this visit.

Since 2005, the newsroom has been in a race to adopt and master multimedia technology, particularly video technology. This newsroom of 86 is filled with 'backpack' reporters who shoot their own video. In the first six months of 2006, 56 out of 76 reporters, photographers and editors either created or participated in some form of multimedia. A Web editor and two assistant editors are responsible for training and editing. It is not uncommon for three video reports to be in production in a single day. On a recent Friday, five reporter-produced videos were being edited for the weekend.

Editors acknowledge they've traded some quality for quantity in an effort to master the technology and spread multimedia enthusiasm.

But for me, still a traditionalist, the most instructive lesson is how the Web has impacted newspaper coverage and the City Desk. They, too, have sacrificed some quality for quantity, and News Editor Christine Peterson says it's most evident in their ability to do enterprise and investigative work.

There simply isn't time. "We're asking people to work faster," says Peterson, who has been at The Californian 9 1/2 years. When she was a reporter, she did a fraction of what her reporters are being asked to do now (video, audio, Web news alerts, Web stories and story promos on the local ABC TV affiliate).

"What are we sacrificing? Where is my good A1 indepth story getting done? When is that happening? The flow of quality A1 stories that TV can't do. That's what I want our franchise to be," she says. "If I'm doing all this quick quick stuff, how do I get to the point where I'm also doing the quality big stuff?"

Peterson, who understands the need to be a continuous news service on the Web and who even loves to work with reporters on audio pieces called "Behind the Story," expects (and hopes) that the system will balance itself out over time.

"We're not at a point where we're willing to say no (to the Web). It's manic right now. I don't know where we're going to land," she says.

Bakersfield's embrace of the Web is amazing. It's certainly one way to approach the inevitable: with both feet.

And I commend top editors and executives for trying to meaningfully spread the new culture with what Jenner describes as "business literacy" seminars.

He brought in tech experts and people from his own advertising and circulation departments to talk to reporters about the changing marketplace. And he talks often about moving out of traditional newsroom silos. "The Web is everyone's responsibility and everyone's opportunity," he says.

But I wonder what the harm would be in reducing by one or two the number of reporter-produced videos in a day or week in exchange for some good old-fashioned contextual news reporting and investigative work.

By doing that, the quality of the Web videos would increase and The Californian would be in better position to provide its core readers with the one thing they can't get anywhere else: good civic journalism.