Stop by Poynter most Sunday evenings and you'll find a group of journalists gathering in the Great Hall for the kickoff of another Poynter seminar. They've converged on St. Petersburg from around the country with a common goal in mind: becoming better journalists.

This page is no Great Hall. Odds are, it's not even Sunday evening where you're reading this now. But thanks to the Web, we're able to welcome you to a new Poynter experience available at the time and place of your choice.

The 48 pages that follow represent our first effort at building a digital, interactive tool for the Web from the real life interaction of a seminar.

Don't think of it as a report on the seminar. We had to leave too much out.

It's not exactly Distance Learning, either. You don't have to register for anything. Just click on the topics that interest you.

With your help and advice, we hope to develop a new form of teaching on the web that enables us to reach many more journalists than we could ever pack into our building on Third Street South. Even after the expansion due to get underway later this year. For this prototype, we selected a seminar with plenty to teach us as we build: Producing, Editing and Designing Online News, a week-long session directed by a leading New Media teacher, Poynter's Nora Paul. Rochelle Lavin, a talented multi-media journalist with experience as a reporter, editor, online producer and teacher, led the development of this package. She was supported by the versatile Poynter team listed below. The content comes from the people in the picture above: the faculty and participants of the seminar.

Mario Garcia delivered the opening keynote for this seminar, and I'd suggest you start there. The easiest way to navigate the package is via the headings to the right or the next button on the bottom of the main pages. We hope you find this site useful. We hope you'll let us know how we can make it more so.

Bill Mitchell
Editor of Poynter Online

The package is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher. You'll need Real Player G2 to view the multi-media examples provided by Judy Nichols of The Arizona Republic.