User polls, done the right way. As I've written about in the past, online surveys are rife with the opportunity for misleading results. Use online comments as a reporting tool. The truly interactive news site will not only solicit user comments, but also use them as part of the news organization's reporting. The story about youths having trouble finding summer jobs, for example, can ask Web site users to contribute their personal stories.
Reporters can follow up and interview some of the people who have posted their experiences online.
To sum up, interactivity has a technological component and a human one. While the former can make for a useful Web site, without the latter, a site cannot be termed truly interactive and thus does not make the most of the online medium. My recent column about Cyrix Technologies' portable WebPAD tablet Internet access design specification generated some skepticism by readers. Unless I'm passing a half dozen kidney stones, I should be able to print out enough stuff to get me through a session on the john. I would never buy this kind of device unless I could take it on the bus or the plane or to the coffee shop.