Day 1 of the Poynter seminar "Online Leadership: Fundamentals of a Changing World."

This is a good group with representatives from some very good papers: Newsday, The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Austin American-Statesman, and The Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier. There are a few smaller papers here (Wyoming Tribune-Eagle and Longview (Texas) News-Journal) and the assistant editor of The Press in Christchurch, New Zealand. There is one TV rep: a senior producer or CBC.ca News Online in Toronto.

Big or small, we seem to share many of the same issues: how to spread "the Web DNA" deep into the newsroom culture; how to do more journalism online or more 24/7 journalism online WITHOUT adding resources; how to edit citizen content (or whether we even should); how to train for multimedia (should everyone be a backpack journalist or should you have a few multimedia experts?), and how do we create a strategic content plan that includes multimedia.

There is much to learn here. Several papers are currently trying to develop a continuous news desk or a breaking news team. Others are trying to figure out how to get more coordination between the newsroom and the online side (Who decides when to add multimedia, for instance?), and still others are trying to move from a place where they repurpose print content to generating original content.

Most of us don't seem to know much about the business side of our Web sites. There will be a whole session on that, from new revenue and advertising opportunities, to search engine marketing and ad formats.

By the end of this seminar on Friday, we're promised "a plan" that will help each of us change one process or practice in our newsrooms. I have an idea what that change should be for The S-R; I'm curious to see if that will change by Friday.