What was your challenge?

My challenge was to help turn our website into a more vibrant site with news, arts and opinion every day. I wanted to identify new areas of readership or markets and provide new online content to create a sense of community, membership and conversation.

What were your results?

I realized there was an opening to create a space for conversation about Jewish women today. There were a lot of sites targeting very niche areas for Jewish women -- politically or religiously -- but there was no place that spanned all of that. We launched a blog called The Sisterhood. Our tag line is where Jewish women converse. I call it a blog on steroids. Sometimes, The Sisterhood blog is the most viewed spot on our website after the homepage. It's now being mentioned in conferences, people know about it. People are coming to us and asking if they can blog for us. And we feel like we really found a voice here.

The other thing the program did was teach us how to do blogs well. And as a result we have started two other blogs. The Shmooze, which is about news and celebrity in the Jewish world, and the Arty Semite, about arts and culture. That was another happy consequence of this.

How did Sulzberger help you realize those results?

The coaching is the key to the success of this program and the thing that distinguishes it from any other executive leadership program that I've done -- and I've done a bunch of them. Because it's not just a matter of getting together at Columbia every few months, being with your colleagues and making the presentations on how your challenge is taking shape; it's the weekly coaching calls. I was able to talk with someone who was really knowledgeable, not just about me and my challenges but about the business. The coaches guide you on how to create and maintain change within an organization. That's huge. Charlie, Doug and Steve are really good at that.

Coaching exemplifies the special character of this program: most of the learning that takes place at work. I've been in other programs where you go and have your class, or you have your team-building expertise and you're all jazzed up. But by next Tuesday, it's over, and you're back where you started -- especially in journalism because there's always the latest news to distract you.

The difference with this program is in the weekly or every-other-week phone calls with my coach, which really helped me to focus on and absorb what I was doing and allowed me to make the changes right then, so I didn't wait until the next meeting to learn something new.

One of the things that I think has happened with Sulzberger, not just to me but to the Forward staff as a whole, is that we're learning to measure what we do. I know that seems so simple but when you run a paper that's over a century old, you feel so attached to the mission that you don't always measure what's happening now. The marvelous thing about the Web is that you can measure everything. And that really challenged us to do so. Done well, I really do believe it can affect the whole operation of whatever journalism enterprise you're involved in.