The homegrown Readership Institute recently released a number of reports about the newspaper reading experience. Overall interesting stuff, but for online folks their recommendations for attracting younger readership through focused discussion and debate is particularly germane.
I was kicking this around with my colleague Rich Gordon for a bit and came to the conclusion that what's needed is a toolbox of "debate/discussion" widgets between the low bandwidth end of polls and the (too) high bandwidth open discussion forums. Sounds like grist for a class project.