The lights dimmed, the chatter died and some of the scariest words for newspaper editors began flashing across the room's two display screens: Indifference. Information overload. Participatory journalism. Ten million bloggers.

"I don't know about you guys, but all of that stuff... used to scare the pants off of me," said Jen Friedberg, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's multimedia producer. "But I realized that people actually don't want us to do anythin other than what we have been doing all along."

Friedberg was one of two presenters to speak at the "Future of Features" segment of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' 2006 conference in Fort Worth.

Howard Elliott, executive editor of The Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator, gave a presentation about how his paper reclaimed declining readership among women 25-49 and baby boomers. To do this, he recommended blowing up the newspaper. After looking at the Power to Grow readership study, his newspaper started over by eliminating three of its traditional sections, including entertainment and features. These were replaced with one 18- to 26-page magazine called Go, with daily coverage of food, health and fitness, celebrities --yes, a whole page of guilty pleasure - and style, which included fashion, home and garden and interior design. The paper even installed a $50,000 kitchen where staffers not only test recipes but host cooking classes for the public in an attempt to leverage the paper's brand.

The front page saw nontraditional design and content. The paper cut down on the number of stories written in the inverted pyramid format - used in 71 percent of all news stories nationwide - and encouraged writers to use narrative and serial storytelling techniques.

Some of the newspaper's staff members were skeptical about the changes at first.

"When we started to see the readership results, even the ones who hadn't bought into it couldn't argue," Elliott said. "They had to admit that, ‘Yes, this is working.'"

Many of Friedberg's examples of multimedia packages from her paper's Website, www.star-telegram.com, involved presenting traditional content in an innovative way. One, a story about pageant queens, simply linked sections of the story and photo slideshows from an illustrated map.

Other packages added simple audio and video to present something extra. In the most elaborate example, photos, videos and vignettes from a reporter and photographer's journey along the U.S.-Mexico border were plotted on an interactive map.

She said programs like Flash 8 and Sound Slides, a $40 program that helps pair photos with audio, make multimedia projects relatively simple.

"You don't have to know code," she said. "It's more about using what resources you have and managing them well."

Heather Keels is a senior at the University of Maryland. Lisa Ogle is an AASFE Diversity Fellow.