Dispatches from multimedia day at the Associated Press Managing Editors conference:

This morning's keynote speaker, Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says that newspapers are using the Web but not in the way it was conceived and not innovatively. A lot of papers are still just repurposing their print content and not thinking about origination.

Warning: the WashingtonPost.com operation employs 80 people. That's a lot of origination power, but much of what Brady suggested is applicable to smaller papers.

Brady's five opportunities on the Web:

1. Distribution. We don't control formats but we can exploit them. Find multiple ways to get content to users such as video/audio, cell phone feeds, RSS, e-mail newsletters. "Don't be on the Web, be OF the Web."

2. Audience targeting. Get over the initial hurdle. Get users to your Web site once by throwing out "multiple fishing lines" and many will return. Do that by "building communities" around topics of interest people care about, whatever that is: high school sports, gardening, Elvis. Build a community and they will come.

3. Storytelling/multimedia. The beauty of the Web is its flexibility; it allows you to tell stories in different ways: text, photo slideshows, panoramic photos, video, audio, interactive graphics, live chats, citizen journalism, blogs.

4. Databases/mashups. "The endless news hole on the Web is a myth. You can only host as much content as you can produce." Databases are endless. WashingtonPost.com excels at databases.

Example 1: a Votes database (back to 1991) that allows users to sort by state, by votes, by missed votes, by astrological sign (Yes, really). This site is so comprehensive that other papers use it to originate content: how many votes has our representative missed? The Post offers RSS feeds on this (and everything else) so readers can be notified when their legislator did or did not vote.

Example 2: Faces of the Fallen (The Spokesman-Review has a similar database) that allows sorting by age, home state, branch of service, date of death.

Examples 3-5: Databases on Gitmo detainees, Sept. 11 victims, and reporter profile pages with lists of recent stories and alerts when they write new stories.

Example 6: Midterm Madness, a Fantasy Football-like site for mid-term elections.

5. Reader engagement. Citizen blogs and staff blogs enabled with reader comment are good ways to build engagement with the paper. Blogs have a bad reputation, but they're just "another format" for presenting information, just shorter and edgier than traditional stories.

Random nuggets:

1. 50 print reporters in the regular Post newsroom (housed separately from the Web operation) carry video cameras. The Post uses five or six reporter-produced pieces a week. The quality vs. quantity issue: Post editors say "no" to poor quality and apparently reporters there understand.

2. David Leeson, Dallas Morning News: Why the angst? He says he's not threatened at all by the Web. It will allow us to do what we got in the business to do: tell good stories. "But somewhere along the way we got fat," says Leeson. "The more things change, the more they stay the same. Aren't we still telling great stories?" A camera is a camera is a camera, says Leeson. "Now I have motion and sound."

3. Adrian Holovaty, WashingtonPost.com computer programmer extraordinaire: he practices what he calls "journalism via computer programming." Journalism is broken, he says. Not our credibility, our stock prices, our circulation, our classifieds, but this: "We collect information and throw it out everyday."

Typical cops reporters who collect basic facts on a burglary and write a 6-inch brief are missing opportunity, he says.

Holovaty is the programmer who created chicagocrime.org, a fabulously rich database that allows residents of Chicago to find out not only about crime in their neighborhood, but on their block, and then get an alert when a crime has occurred.

Holovaty says papers need to leverage the information we've been collecting for years because that is our advantage over Google, craigslist, etc. We have data, but no framework; they have the framework, but no data. "We're collecting information anyway. Do something intelligent with it." Our other advantage over Google et al: we use humans.

4. Quote of the day: "Web sites are the hail mary pass of journalism right now," Joel Sappell, executive editor of LA Times online.

5. I found Rob Curley. He really is a geek. He really does chug Mt. Dew and Red Bull and his multimedia is breathtaking, and to talk about it textually (even in an online blog) is stupid. This guy is unreal, but his message is democratic: Multimedia improves storytelling.

His 7 strategies for newspapers:

1. Own local breaking news. "You can't sit on it anymore. People will just think we're bad," not that we're holding it for Sunday A1.

2. Hyperlocal content. Exploit the topics your community cares about. Decide what your paper's franchise beats are.

3. Database driven content. The theme today. It's no coincidence that both Curley and Holovaty work for The Washington Post.

4. Multimedia overkill.

5. Evergreen content that lasts forever. Build sites on your franchises (GU basketball, for example) and they will last forever and define where you live.

6. Platform-independent delivery. Any time, any way: cell phones, iPods, computers. "If we can figure out how to beam content to your ass, we'd do it."

7. A dialogue not a monologue.