FAIRFAX, Va. --- From using a manual typewriter to blogging via camera-enabled Blackberrys, a lot has changed, said Ken Sands, Congressional Quarterly's Executive Director for Innovation. He is "one of the newspaper industry's leading online thinkers and doers" said CQ Editor and Vice President Michael Riley on a Poynter Forum post. On Tuesday, February 19, 2008, Sands spoke to a group of online journalism students at George Mason University , sharing the evolution of the mainstream media (MSM) as he sees it .

Newspaper websites were launched in the mid '90s, primarily to repurpose print content and test out interactivity, Sands said. He showed students screen shots of some of the early web innovators, such as the Lawrence Journal-World website in 1996, with community bulletin boards. Working as the interactive editor for SpokesmanReview.com, The Spokesman Review newspaper's online edition, Sands created a database of online readers in 1997 to e-mail breaking news to at random and get thoughtful feedback. He was a proponent of civic journalism.

"One of the things that I recoginized right away was the ability to interact on the web," he said.

On September 11, Sands said he was probably the only editor in the biz who thought "Oh my God, I have to get to the office so I can send out e-mail." He e-mailed about 1,000 readers and received about 168 responses. The next day, the "Letter to the Editor" page online was dedicated to nothing but responses from people who had all ready shared their thoughts about what the event meant for America and what we should do about it.

Right now, we're trying to find out how to create web-original content, Sands said. He's divided this content into four categories: Immediacy, interactivity, multimedia and database utility.

Immediacy means updating news stories as they occur. An example of being dedicated to immediacy that Sands mentioned was the Tampa Tribune uploading a video online of a high school basketball game controversy nearly nine hours before its competitor, the St. Petersburg Times.

The first account of interactivity was forums. Another form of interactivity is interacting with a database.Another is live online discussions, which Sands is particularly fond of.

"If people get involved in these chats, they become loyal readers. They are actually participants in the news process," he said. "And people want to come back, to see how their comment may have influenced something."

An example of multimedia Sands mentioned was video commentary based on the news, specifically "the show with zefrank." The creator, Hosea Frank, made five-minute videos five days a week that hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to daily. Another example is political cartoonist Mark Fiore's animated cartoons, like The Spies Who Love You! Sands mentions database utility as a "visual representation of data." The databases MAPLight.org creates of voting results is one example Sands mentioned.

So, what's the media going to do next?

"Everyone is inundated with media all the time," he said. "The winners will be the ones who figure out how to be the one-stop information shop; that's where people will gravitate."

The answer is aggregration, building a one-stop information shop that saves time.