Strength in numbers: upstate New York editorial pages step out of NYC's shadow.

Blame it on Amtrak. Late last March, the New York State caucus of the National Conference of Editorial Writers held a state budget briefing in Albany. It was a good session, not just for the immediate pre-vote briefings by Governor Eliot L. Spitzer and State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, but for the networking and shop talk. (If you ever have the chance to do one of these, do it!)

And then there was the train ride.

In separate but similar incidents of unclear thinking, editorial page editor Jim Lawrence of Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle and I decided it somehow made sense to take the train to and from Albany rather than drive. Must have been all those editorials on gas guzzling. What we forgot to take into account was the fact that the freight lines treat Amtrak like an unwanted stepchild, and that means the trains always run late. Instead of a four-hour drive, I got an eight-hour train ride. And then, of course, there was the ride back.

By this time Jim and I had discovered we'd both made the same mistake. (He has less of an excuse, because he's an hour closer to the state capital.) And we were, in fact, on the same late-night return train. And, as its scheduled run stretched toward eternity, Jim discovered he had an audience for an idea he'd been trying to pitch for some time.

Thus was born the Upstate Editorials Project.

"Upstate" is a pretty vague division in New York. Basically, it means "not New York City" But definitions can vary--Long Island's generally excluded, but the definition takes deeper root the farther north and west you go from The City, where New York's wealth and political power tend to concentrate. Jim's fundamental idea was to get "upstate" newspapers to work together in some fashion on issues of mutual, but not necessarily downstate, concern.

Just what editorial page editors need--more work. But several thousand clickety-clacks later, I was on board. And within days, we were recruiting. A planning session at the Democrat and Chronicle followed, with page editors from some of the interested newspapers attending. And thus the Upstate Editorials Project spawned Upstate Focus, a collaborative effort.

Before I tell you how that works, a confession: We don't really know where we're going with this. It's very much an experiment, an NCEW experiment gone public. We think it has some intrinsic power, but we haven't fully explored that yet. The training wheels are still on.

We have run Upstate Focus editorials twice now, in July and September. We'll do more. The process is this--by teleconference or email, editors from newspapers across upstate settle on an editorial topic. Then each newspaper independently reaches an opinion on that topic and writes an editorial on it. All the editorials run on the same day, across the state. At The Buffalo News we've been compiling the editorials on a single Webpage that is cited in the print editorials, so that readers can see what's being said elsewhere in the state. The project is described in some boilerplate with each paper's editorials, and papers can and do publish excerpts, publish columns, and blog about the topics that day.

What good does that do? Think of it as firing a broadside, instead of a cannon. If the real power of an editorial page is setting an agenda, this can be a powerful tool.

Of course, by tasking each newspaper with reaching an independent opinion on the topic--a concession to editors and publishers concerned about relinquishing any amount of editorial control and/or appearing to be in collusion--the cannons in our broadside might be aimed in different directions, providing more flash and bang than actual impact. That's a bit of a drag on effect, but even if it's not setting a direction it still helps set the statewide agenda. We've yet to explore that deeply, but we suspect that can be most powerful when we highlight an issue or topic that's not on the radar screen for state government or the public, but should be.

Topic one, in July, was state lawmakers' practice of returning cash to property taxpayers by way of a rebate check, instead of just fixing tax rates. The first time, the checks came out just before elections with incumbents doing the forwarding and taking the credit for, in effect, returning to taxpayers money that shouldn't have been collected from them in the first place. This year, the incumbents just sent out how-to notices and the process was more bureaucracy-based. Unsurprisingly, the range of editorial opinions wasn't wide. But we were basically testing the process. Participating were nine newspapers--Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle, The Buffalo News, Fred Fiske's Post-Standard in Syracuse, John McFadden's Watertown Daily Times, Mark Mahoney's Post-Star in Glens Falls, Mary Pat Hyland's Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, Sharon Larsen's Daily News in Batavia, Art Clayman's Daily Gazette in Schenectady, and Dave Kubissa's Star-Gazette in Elmira. Other papers stayed in the info and planning loop, for now.

Reaction was a little tough to read. The editorials ran on the day a major abuse-of-power scandal broke in Albany, and the issue was buried. I asked Tom Precious, our Albany bureau chief, if there had been any reaction in the capital, and he said "Mike, people here are talking about only one thing, and it's not your project."

September's topic was governmental consolidation and potential taxpayer savings, which generated editorials-from seven papers this time, thanks to the press of election business--with a lot more local-impact research. As of this writing, a few days later, we haven't yet done the post mortem. But we think there's a lot of life left in this experiment, especially with New York claiming the top Democratic, Republican, and independent presidential candidates so far.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And if not, I can always just blame the train ride.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Check out Upstate Focus editorials, a Joint project of nine upstate New York editorial pages. www.upstatefocus.com

Mike Vogel is editorial page editor at The Buffalo News in upstate New York. Email: mvogel@buffnews.com