Why are you doing this? It’s a question the founders of the Beacon often get.

The short answer is we believe good reporting functions as the eyes of a community. Thoughtful analysis and commentary help all of us make sense of what we see. As traditional media have faltered economically, they’ve been providing less of these crucial services. We want to provide more.

But we don’t just want to replicate what journalists did before. Online, we can create a new form of journalism that is far more useful and compelling. We can report instantaneously while also providing depth, context and continuity. We can link to information anywhere, connecting St. Louisans to the world and vice versa.

Most important, we can engage readers in ways that were previously impossible. Journalism used to be delivered essentially in the form of a monologue, arriving once a day or on the hour. Now it can be an ongoing conversation that constantly evolves to reflect the experience, knowledge and interests of you, our readers.

Though the Internet has been around for years, we’re still at the dawn of online journalism as its own distinctive medium. We’re excited about this opportunity to shape it to serve your needs.

Looking to the future means pondering not only what we should become as an organization, but how we should behave as individuals. No one has thought more deeply or written more eloquently about that than William F. Woo, my former editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Bill rejects the idea that journalists should operate as a class apart and calls instead for us to remember that we’re human beings first. Read his take on things here – especially relevant now as we search for new models in a changing world.

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