THOUGH WHYY’s active presence on the Web includes podcasts, videos and Twitter feeds related to their radio and television programs, the public broadcasting station has only recently launched their first major Web-only initiative.

   It’s Our City is a blog designed to promote civic engagement using the standards of journalism. Managing Editor Alan Tu envisions it as a community conversation, a two-way op-ed page that gives and elicits opinion on local subjects. Mr. Tu is still experimenting with tone and form, trying to establish an audience and overcome technical hurdles.

   ”We’re all watching the world of journalism change,” the former Fresh Air and Radio Times producer says. “I like to think of it as WHYY’s chance to learn. I’m one of the first guinea pigs in this area trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. The exciting thing about something new is there are no established rules.”

   During an interview from his Princeton home, Mr. Tu discusses journalism’s brave new world in Darwinian terms. From media veterans to citizen bloggers, every outlet is competing for advertisers and readers, and no one knows which model will win.

   ”I think broadcasters are watching print, watching the transition, and are unsure about the changes the Internet is about to bring,” he says. “As broadband becomes more widespread and cheaper and more mobile, that’s when broadcasters are going to feel it. It can be a good thing. It can create this huge new audience or it could totally decimate it. I don’t know. But the point is that newspapers got hit pretty hard and broadcasters need to pay attention to that.”

   Mr. Tu has been most successful creating awareness and distributing It’s Our City’s content through Twitter. It has more than 3,000 followers.

   ”A Twitter friend is real on some level, even if you don’t physically know who they are,” Mr. Tu says. “There’s something real there and you have to start understanding those new valid relationships and the way information and stories get passed along that chain. In some way it’s still the same old thing of word of mouth, but you have to figure out how to electronically be something they want to share. That’s what we’re trying.”

   It’s Our City grew from The Next Mayor Project, a multi-media collaboration of WHYY, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Committee of Seventy that examined Philadelphia’s 2007 mayoral election. Mr. Tu continued to blog after the election, hoping to bring local and original content to his audience in a public-radio style.

   He believes WHYY is well suited to present two sides of an issue, even when they’re presented by activist groups with agendas, because readers trust the moderator.

   ”I think going in we have one huge advantage: the way people think of WHYY,” Mr. Tu says. “They create a level of trust. So when you’re looking for a blog, if it says WHYY on it and you’re from that area, there’s a presumption on the level of professional standards that we bring. That’s where established organizations have the natural advantage.”

   Mr. Tu began at WHYY in 1994 as an associate producer of Fresh Air. His job mainly consisted of cutting reel-to-reel tape. He would type a real-time log of the interview conducted by host Terry Gross and organize it into five segments. From interview to air, the turn around time could be a day or a week. After he left in 1999 Fresh Air switched to a computer audio editing system.

   He became a producer of Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane’s weekday program. “Radio Times is a local program and that appealed to me,” Mr. Tu says. “I thought, What a great way to learn more about Philadelphia. Radio Times was that outlet for me, learning about the challenges a big urban city has.”

   He grew up in Fort Collins, Co., and lived in Denver for five years while working as the announcer for the area’s NPR station’s Morning Edition. He studied journalism in college after abandoning a theater major. He compared himself to others in the theater program and realized he would never be successful in the field. “They lived, breathed and slept theater,” he says. If their chances were slim, he reasoned, “I had no chance. That became very clear.”

   He began to disc jockey at the college radio station. “I wasn’t very good at picking music people liked,” he says. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be experimental and free form.” Deterred by phone calls from angry listeners, Mr. Tu pursued a different niche — one practically ignored by the student body. “Everyone else was into music and no one wanted to read the news,” he says. “The station needed news readers.” So he tried it, initially stumbling over the copy but soon finding his voice, and something else.

   ”If you read the news long enough, you begin to understand it,” he says. “I began to understand how the American politics system worked. I started to get excited. I understood this. That gave me a lot of confidence. That was the experience that said, Do journalism.”

   Since then the nature of journalism has changed considerably. He’s adapting to the environment like everyone else, learning how to be a multimedia reporter able to write for a blog, shoot video, take pictures and post it all to the Web.

   Reporters may be evolving, but if they are to survive, they’ll need a business model to support their work. “The problem is that local stories and local content matters just as much as they did in the past but because of the Internet it has become a free grab bag,” Mr. Tu says. “The challenge is, can we get people to pay for what they value?”

   He believes the public radio model may be journalism’s saving grace. Indeed, many nonprofits, from Voice of San Diego to New Jersey Newsroom, are establishing identities on the Web.

   ”It’s all about the art of the totebag,” Mr. Tu says. “The one with the best totebag is going to win this.”

• It’s Our City on the Web: http://whyy.org/blogs/itsourcity