TAKING NOTES:

We are reminded constantly here at the Daily Pilot just how much the world of journalism is changing. The major catalyst of that change, if you haven’t been living under a rock, is evident. It’s the Internet.

Three years ago this February, we launched a website that was officially separated from the website of our parent company, the Los Angeles Times. It’s not that we had anything against our page on www.latimes.com but we were limited in what we could accomplish and the Times staff was limited in its resources to help us.

So we struck out on our own with the new www.dailypilot.com site, creating reader and staff photo galleries, classified and retail advertising opportunities, and an online calendar of events.

Our award-winning special sections, like the Boat Parade and the DP 103 (Newport-Mesa’s most influential people) can now be found online 365 days of the year, 24 hours a day as well as an archive of stories back to 1999. Readers can sign up for Daily Pilot RSS feeds and Breaking News e-mail alerts and we have greatly expanded our ability to shoot and display video.

And oh yeah, we added one other thing. This little feature called reader comments.

That feature, a freewheeling, anonymous and often mean-spirited sparing match, has been the bane of my existence for the last couple years.

Readers love them and hate them. Those who hate them have angrily argued with me, sent me flaming e-mails and even threatened to hurt the newspaper in the pocketbook.

Other editors and I took the bruising and stayed the course. Our belief being that at the end of the day we were doing the right thing by ensuring the Daily Pilot is the local Town Hall for debate and discussion in Newport-Mesa.

“Courage,” Dan Rather used to say at the end of his broadcasts. I think I know what he meant by that now.

Even still, we acknowledge that three years in, we are still neophytes when it comes to the web.

So after much angst and agonizing, we concluded it was time to put some controls on our reader comments and install a registration feature that allows us to keep our reader commentators more accountable.

The feature went live last week and as expected, the reader comments tapered off at first. But as time went on and readers discovered the one-time registration is painless and easy, the comments started coming back.

Indeed, as of this writing, about 100 people have registered to use the feature. And better yet, a comparison of our web traffic from the week before registration to last shows no real discernible loss of readership, which now averages about 9,000 visitors a day compared to the 1,500 visitors that we had at our launch three years ago. That’s six times more readers online today.

Not bad growth if I don’t say so myself.

We plan to make even more changes.

Starting Friday, the Daily Pilot website will have a new look with new features and more reader involvement to reflect our multimedia evolution online. Readers will be able to send us news stories and photos that will run on a new featured page called Town Hall.

Our video and Daily Pilot Today broadcasts will be more prominent on the page and we’re taking local sports to a whole new level.

We’ve also made some other changes over the last couple weeks that readers should become more aware of as the days go on. As part of what we call our new “web centric” philosophy, news stories, columns and features will now appear online first and in the print edition second.

For example, web readers could have read Jim Righeimer’s Rigonomics column last Friday afternoon, instead of Saturday when it appeared in print.

Our plan is to “break news on the web and explain it in print” as Managing Editor Brady Rhoades likes to say.

We still have much work to do and more features to create. But if we do it right, we can successfully take the Daily Pilot into the future and ensure its survival in this new multimedia world.

And just like the reader comments, I look forward to hearing readers give me more of that, um, constructive criticism in the days and weeks ahead.

TONY DODERO is the director of news and online. He can be reached at (714) 955-4608 or at tony.dodero@latimes.com.