With Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States around the corner, Thomas Peters (the American Papist) recommended an excellent blog called “A Papal Discussion,” which “examines the role of Pope Benedict XVI in modern Catholicism.” It boasts a variety of qualified contributors from different backgrounds and faiths.

Today, Alejandro Bermudez wrote a great post in anticipation of the Pope’s message, outlining three key aspects to watch for:

1. The Pope will restate Church teaching (i.e. Pope still Catholic!) on “controversial” issues.
2. The Pope is not caught up in political correctness; he “is a creative, independent thinker, and he is more used to intellectual honesty than to crowd-pleasing.”
3. The most important parts of his message will likely not be sound bites which are easily quotable on the news. The are two proposed keys to interpretation:
   1. “Pope Benedict is convinced that Catholic theology needs to engage in an honest discussion with modernity”.
   2. Benedict believes that faith and reason are not opposed, but in fact important allies against the “postmodern belief that truths worthy of being transmitted down the generations don’t exist.”

Alejandro’s point that the most important part of the message won’t be “cotton candy” is a credit to the blog itself; while the New York Times would have trouble covering the message in depth through traditional mass media means (i.e. a newspaper), the blog allows the New Times to facilitate exactly this sort of coverage by leveraging the power of digital technology and the Internet.

But they’ve changed. NY Times’ web developers attended OSCON this year. They’ve opened up the website and put their focus on making their website a destination, on attracting users by making the website useful rather than forcing users to pay for content that they can get elsewhere for free. They’ve launched blogs and podcasts and RSS feeds and all those other useful sorts of things.

I came across the Republic YouTube Debate on their website (via Greg Wilson) which was a great sign of that. Why wouldn’t somebody just watch this on YouTube? Well, the NY Times website offers a transcript of the video that scrolls along beside it and they offer bookmarks so that you can jump to a specific section of the 111 minute-long debate. Also, there’s a transcript analyzer which allows you to view who spoke when and for how long. These are the types of things that attract visitors to your website.

(When I mentioned this to my dad, he directed my attention toward the University of Toronto’s ePresence project – an open source webcasting project that allows you to do more with video, something along these lines.)