Pages must preserve best features as they evolve.

There's no place quite like the editorial page.

What other medium provides such a well-rounded forum for public discussion?

Talk radio is about outrage, about making the lines light up, not about helping a community connect through a common gathering spot. Internet forums offer a quick gut-check, but their culture of anonymity breeds an ugliness and ignorance that turns many people off. And local television--well, it left commentary behind decades ago for fear that half its viewers would turn the channel.

A great editorial page, on the other hand, stands up for its values, its community, and its citizens. It helps people make sense of things. As Michael Gartner said in his book, Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense, it gives people a common yardstick for measuring a community's evolution.

The best call out injustice, hold people accountable, and pat people on the back. They get passionate about things, laugh at life's hiccups, and create an experience that makes readers want to turn there first, like eating dessert before the main course.

Editorial boards are stocked with smart, reflective people who take the time to look a little closer and think things through. At our most-recent national convention, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill lamented that the only time she expects a deep policy discussion is when she visits an editorial board.

And for those who question the impact of editorial endorsements, consider how Senator John Edwards' campaign soared after his 2004 endorsement by The Des Moines Register; or how former Governor Mitt Romney's popularity fell after the Concord Monitor called him a phony. If newspaper endorsements didn't matter, why would presidential candidates find the time to visit those of us in early primary states?

Yet our profession is in peril. John Oppedahl, former publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and The Arizona Republic, told our membership last year that we had three years to prove our value to publishers. Otherwise our days are numbered.

Like newsrooms everywhere, editorial boards have seen staffing erode. In Tampa we've lost two positions. The Chicago SunTimes recently laid off three. Tough choices lie ahead everywhere.

What keeps me awake at night is the vulnerability editorial boards face in this digital world. Our readers are loyal, but aging. To remain relevant, we must increase our appeal and meet the demands of an ever-changing audience.

Let's be honest. While newsrooms have been awash in change efforts for decades, editorial boards have been slow to evolve.

Until now.

Consider the opening-day "boot camp" at our October convention in Kansas City. The topic: video editorials.

At the same convention, we announced a national initiative to engineer a muscular future for opinion journalism. We are exploring ideas for online features and new tools of engagement.

Remember, it means something for readers to have a letter published in the paper. People keep those letters for years--on their refrigerators or in their scrapbooks. Properly stoked and creatively developed, this relationship will transcend print on paper.

It discourages me to hear editorialists say they simply hope their jobs survive until they retire. As a profession, we must grab hold and make our future together. We owe this debt to the generations behind us, to our communities, and to our democracy.

The man who won the Tribune's Letter of the Year two years ago, an airman at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, expressed the public value of the editorial page while accepting his award. He told the story of going through the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A and having some anonymous customer inside buy his dinner. He wanted to thank the community for supporting the troops. So he wrote a letter to the editor.

There's no place like our pages. We are the place to be seen and heard on issues affecting our community.

We are a public trust that needs to be protected and preserved.

Rosemary Goudreau is the editorial page editor at The Tampa Tribune in Florida. Email: rgoudreau@tampatrib.com