By the time Smith was promoted to editor and vice president of the Times Union in 2002, the paper no longer led the online market. In fact, it had started to fall behind. Like many newspaper executives at the time, Smith was not sure how best to reach readers through the Internet, nor how many internal resources to divert to the website. Encouraged by strong reader response to the Diallo coverage, the Times Union produced a few multimedia stories on the same scale in the following years, but these stories failed to generate similar reader interest. Very few readers seemed to take much interest in exhaustively reported, online stories about Malawi , or a special project about the commercial center of Albany . Smith wondered if these types of stories were worth all the effort the newsroom poured into them.

The root of the problems, Smith felt, was that decisions about the Web had been made absent a long-term strategy; instead, the newsroom process had grown organically. "As the paper grew and got more complex, the system just didn't really adapt," Smith says. "There wasn't the pressure to make the change." Specifically, the Times Union had not figured out how to incorporate the Internet into its detailed operational structure. Smith saw the Web's potential to carry breaking news—something readers had come to expect—but the paper's old content management system (CMS) made it cumbersome to get news to the website quickly. Moreover, the paper's Internet group functioned much like another features department, rather than being embraced as a promising new channel to deliver all manner of news and services to readers.

Listen to Smith discuss the organic growth of Times Union.

Smith had a strong, even emotional, commitment to the role of newspapers in the community. For the Times Union' s 150-year anniversary in 2006, Smith was invited to the state library to look at the first edition of the Albany Morning Times . Holding the copy in his hands, he recalls "getting a lump in my throat." He wrote in an editorial later that week: "Our values remain fundamentally unchanged from those our founders laid out: to keep an eye on what goes on in our community, to bring readers the news they need to know, to act independently."

But he recognized that respect for traditional journalistic values was no longer enough. To Smith and other Times Union leaders, it was becoming clear that newspapers were confronting more than the kind of cyclical downturn seen in the past, and that in fact there had been permanent shifts in reading habits. Indications of a monumental change were becoming clear at the Times Union . By the end of 2006, website traffic was up to record numbers: TimesUnion.com had over 217,000 visitors a month, a 51 percent increase from 2002. By contrast, print circulation was just over 100,000, a 10 percent drop from five years earlier. To Smith and the team, these numbers showed that the newspaper's readers were changing their behavior and becoming more Web-dependent, even if the Times Union was not.

The Times Union needed a vision for the 21st century—or at least for the next five years. "We learned that we needed to pay more attention to the marketplace," Smith says. "We needed to listen to our readers. We needed to adapt to their changing lives and present what we hold to be important in a way that could be consumed by them." The question was: What vision, and how would the paper achieve it?