Providing a forum for the exchange and communication of ideas in the University community is the mission of The Minnesota Daily.

As the Internet matures to provide evermore local and interactive content, this paper is better positioned to fulfill that mission than ever before.

Already, MNDaily.com has story previews, breaking news, slideshows, videos and blogs.

This semester we will craft a new Web site: easier to use and full of exclusive content. By May, our site will be cleaner looking with more news, more sports, and more local arts and music.

Instead of relentlessly adding features, a team of designers is working to strategically add capabilities and navigability to our Web site.

We monitor and analyze the use of our site extensively in conjunction with survey research, all done in-house. We're interested in making a site that will be both useful and appealing to the whole University community.

Behind the scenes, a team of committed Web programmers works around the clock to maintain our site without any outside participation, unlike many other college papers.

In December, we innovated toward fulfilling our mission in unprecedented ways. A new blog, "Speak Up," offers readers a chance to engage with a diverse group of bloggers representing many cultures and interests at the University. Students can get an inside look at decisions made in the administration and voice their feedback on the same blog where others are discussing discrimination on campus.

In our foray into audio we created two new podcasts. "The A&E Rollup" delivers a weekly package of conversations with local artists and entertainers surrounded by irreverently gratifying commentary. You can hear a new episode every Thursday at MNDaily.com/ae or through iTunes. A sports podcast will debut next week and will feature interviews with Gophers athletes and insightful analysis of Gopher sports. Through the podcast, the Daily will offer an inside look at the football season as it begins to take shape.

Sports is the most visited area of MNDaily.com, so accordingly we plan on adding new dimensions of multimedia to our coverage there. This spring will bring slideshow recaps of the week's major games. These brief slideshows, narrated by our sports reporters, will provide an up-close look with keen analysis, all in less than two minutes. We will continue to post exclusive video coverage of Gophers sports and put more photos online than are printed in the paper.

There's excitement in the newsroom with our storytelling capabilities expanding. Now, photographers, videographers and graphics artists are teaming up to make truly multimedia creations that allow us to cover news in whole new ways. We're even creating our first semester-long multimedia documentary to appear in May.

The Daily is adapting to apply its diverse talents to MNDaily.com, and I'm certain we are on our way to making some exceptional accomplishments.

It is my aim for the Daily to innovatively become a news site competitive in navigability and content to professional sites. With exciting changes in store for this spring, check out our Web site and ask yourself, what can MNDaily.com do for me? I have a lot of answers but I am most interested in hearing yours.

Chris Roberts welcomes comments at croberts@mndaily.com