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An editor for Ifra's magazine, Newspaper Techniques, interviewed me via email. Here's my response:

How can newspapers implement community sites?

I think the first step is to recognize the nature of community, and the constructive role played by journalism.

We typically don't do that. We typically think our job begins and ends with "covering the news," and we don't think carefully enough about what effects we have in the community.

Our goal should be helping build a society in which people are not only well informed, but are empowered and motivated to participate actively. Every decision we make, every coverage choice, affects that goal.

The word "community" is a slippery one, and the definition is changing. We used to think of a community as a place. The Internet has created a new definition: communities of interest.

There's a lot we can learn from Internet startups if we just recognize that geographic community is actually a special interest. A smart special-interest community-builder works to heighten participants' sense of identity -- of being part of something special. Traditional, local media can do that, too.

How can a newspaper group start something similar to BlufftonToday.com? What is needed in terms of technology? How can such a 'newsroom' be organised?

The important thing to recognize about Bluffton Today is that it's a multimedia operation that endeavors to exploit the unique strengths of each medium.

The newspaper is free and home-delivered, taking advantage of print's advantages in browsability and discovery.

The website engages people in a conversation through blogs and photo-sharing, taking advantage of the Internet's advantages in human interaction and immediacy.

These two sides come together through a professional news staff that uses the Web as a listening post. We pick up some blogs and photos for the print product, but the real "secret sauce" is that the community conversation helps the professional journalist connect with the real interests and passions of regular people, and not just the agendas of the institutions and newsmakers that pro journalists usually cover.

Our own research shows that the professional news staff of Bluffton Today is closely aligned with members of the community when asked about community issues and problems, while there is a big gap at most other newspapers. We think that tight alignment is one of the big factors contributing to the extraordinary readership success of the newspaper.

To make this work, the news staff has to be broadly engaged with the website and the blogging process. It's more a matter of culture change and mindset than organizational structure, although the wrong structural approach can certainly build barriers and walls between journalists and the Web. We're moving toward very deep integration of the Web into the newsrooms of all of our newspapers.

The technology isn't difficult or expensive, and the open-source software movement is making that more true every day. We wrote our own photo-sharing software to meet our specific needs, but our blogging and social networking tools are built on the free Drupal platform. Since we launched BlufftonToday.com on April 1, 2005, hundreds of newspapers around the world have adopted Drupal as an online community technology.

Open source works best when "many hands make light work." Ken Rickard at Morris DigitalWorks has contributed a very powerful personalization module to Drupal, and I would strongly encourage other newspaper companies to make similar technology contributions. You can learn more at http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal.

What would be the job description for a citizen journalist?

I would rather look for an effective citizen than a "citizen journalist."

We're not looking to have citizens do our jobs for us, although there will often be a big overlap in roles played by an active citizen and a professional journalist.

In general, people are not looking to become amateur news reporters. They're primarily looking to join in Internet conversations that meet a number of very personal needs, and those conversations can touch on topics from the mundane to the profound.

The important thing for us to recognize is that all of those conversations -- including the mundane -- are valuable and help people build the relationships that enable meaningful community interaction to take place. Small talk is important.

This process of building "social capital" lays the foundation for a community, whether it's a community of geography or of interest.

We all tend to cite the example of the 2005 London bombings as an example of how anyone can be a journalist in a crisis.

I think the more interesting thing is how anyone can be an investigator every day.

The Web is enabling activists to organize and self-publish. We're seeing activists take on the role of watchdog, and we're seeing activists digging through public information and looking for patterns, and we're seeing activists reveal truths that others would prefer to keep hidden. We should embrace that change. We should celebrate and call attention to their successes, and we should correct their failures.

What is the best way to manage an on-line newspaper with user generated content?

We need to become convenors, guides, facilitators and participants.

Here are a few skills that deserve special attention:

Community building: We should be picking the brains of sociologists, psychologists and political scientists for everything they can tell us about how we can get people away from their TV sets and into group processes with their neighbors.

Conversational writing and listening: A lot of journalists are dreadfully inept when handed a weblog. A successful blogger knows how to select topics that people care about, how to write informally and conversationally, how to be brief, how to listen to responses, and how to interact.

Presentations and group interaction: We can't be successful conveners of communities if all we do is sit on our backsides and play with computers. We have to get out of the office and in front of individuals and groups, talking and listening and selling the idea of joining in an online process that will make the local community a better place.

Guerrilla marketing and promotion: Journalists like to pretend that some magic fairy will swoop down and take care of marketing and promotion, but it doesn't work that way. Getting people to read and participate is everyone's job. One of our most successful efforts is Spotted, our photo-sharing program, in which we send staffers, interns or volunteers out to shoot hundreds of photos of people who are attending public events (turning the camera around on the audience). Each photo subject gets a "You've Been Spotted" business card with the website's address. It works.

Humility: The managing editor of Bluffton Today spent one afternoon soaked in soapy water, bathing dogs to raise money for the local humane society. We all need to climb down from our self-constructed pedestals and get comfortable with the crowd. Arrogance is the cancer of professional journalism, and we need to stop it.

Ifra's Citizen Media Summit in Malaysia looked like it might not happen, but the word this morning was that the class enrollment was sufficient, so we're greenlighted. If you're interested in attending, there's probably still space available. The three-day, workshop-style conference will be held July 2-4 at the Parkroyal Kuala Lumpur Hotel.

Upcoming in July: a citizen media workshop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, under the aegis of the international newspaper technology organization Ifra. From the webpage:

First Time In Asia! Citizen Media Summit

How to Ride on the Wave of the Digital Deluge

Date: 2 - 4 July 2007
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Language(s): English

Summary / Composition / Zusammenfassung

The newspaper is under attack by the new media. All over the world, citizen journalism sites are popping up like mushrooms. And as the internet matures, you can be sure there will be more blogs, more aggregators, more Googles and more tools will give the reader a huge range of options to choose from.

How can your company cope with the biggest challenge it has ever faced? Come join us to learn from the panel of experts from Korea, USA and UK for 3 days workshop.

I'm scheduled to be on the "faculty" along with Kevin Anderson of the Guardian, Jean Min of OhMyNews, and Robb Montgomery of VisualEditors.com. Download the brochure.

Earlier this week I was in St. Petersburg for a meeting of AP's Digital Advisory Committee. I'm not going to blog what transpired there, because it's a forum for discussing some confidential strategic issues, but I heard one thing that's such a good idea I just have to pass it along.

AP is equipping its reporters and photographers with a very simple piece of old technology: paper, in the form of a release document. If you're covering a major public news event, there's likely to be someone there with a camera phone. And in it may be the picture of the year. It could happen. Rather than hope it shows up on Flickr with the appropriate license attached, the AP staffer can perhaps persuade the "citizen journalist" to sign a release and provide the image on the spot. Smart.

I also like that it gives the staffer something tangible to reinforce the concept. Much better than an email saying it's a good idea.

You can do all this without the release, but in this rights-management-crazy world we live in, the paperwork is a good idea.

I'm on the record as having issues with the term "citizen journalism," but this is a case where it fits.

Lines from the past occasionally float to the surface. Here's one I have been thinking about lately: "OK open systems beat great closed systems every time."

That one came from Scott Kurnit around 1994-95, when he was VP/marketing for Prodigy. His company, originally a joint venture of CBS, Sears and IBM, had built a closed system (great in its day) that was in the process of getting its tail kicked by a bunch of little startup companies that run by people who had no clear idea where they were going.

These startups were pushing open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML.

Prodigy's system could do animated graphics and had complete control over presentation. HTML at that point couldn't even do tables, and most of the ISP entrepreneurs didn't know how to keep books or create business plans. Flat-rate Internet pricing wasn't the result of a business decision. The ISP entrepreneurs just didn't know how to charge by the minute.

Yet in a matter of months, the open system ended the era of closed, proprietary online services.

There are other examples. VHS versus Betamax, for those old enough to remember videotape. Windows vs. Mac. Today we may regard Microsoft as a predator, but in the early days it appeared radically more open than Apple. Steve Jobs' control-freak personality may have made the Macintosh "insanely great" but that control impulse doomed it to near irrelevancy.

How does this apply to journalism?

Journalism arose as a way to overcome the limitations of personal experience and word of mouth.

The printing press allowed experience to be recorded and distributed broadly. Importantly, that experience could be frozen, protected from the corruption inherent in handing information verbally from person to person (Chinese whispers, or "playing telephone.")

By making it possible for everyone to be publisher, the Internet has created a kind of hybrid of document and conversation that has many of the characteristics of a pre-Gutenberg society.

What we are seeing today, this thing that I once called "a new kind of people's journalism," is colliding with traditional media in the same way the World Wide Web hit Prodigy and CompuServe in 1994.

Mike Smith of Northwestern University's Media Management Center says many young people do not feel a need to seek news. If it's important, the news will come to them one way or another.

He's right, and this spells trouble not only for "old media" but also for reformers who mistakenly believes the answer is "give it to them in whatever medium they prefer," because that's code language for "put it on the Web." That won't work.

Flat publication on the Web is optimized to connect with seekers, not people who aren't seeking.

To connect with the new passive majority, you need to be engaged in a broad conversation (that largely isn't about news), and professional journalism simply has not yet figured out how to do that.

Thanks to investor Bruce Sherman's meddling in the newspaper business, suddenly America's newsrooms are acutely aware that the world has changed, and there's a broad debate about what it all means.

One of the recurring themes: What will be the economic foundation that will support serious professional journalism in the future?

What if that's the wrong question?

What if the right question is: What does an open journalism company look like? How does it work? Because if traditional journalism is a closed system, it's going to be clobbered by an "OK" open system. How can we make that open system "good enough?"

When facing the Web, Scott Kurnit didn't sneer at its primitive interface or its complicated setup requirements; he accurately saw the end of the proprietary online services.

He went on to found The Mining Company, which today is known as About.com, a site that puts many individual "guides" to work in an organized fashion to layer some structure and some value on top of the chaos that is the Internet.

Perhaps there's a lesson there for us.

Howard Owens points to a Media Life story quoting UNC J-prof Frank Fee, raising questions about "citizen journalism:"

“It goes back to the days of country correspondents or stringers. They are limited in what they can do, and newspapers have never been very good about training those people. ... I have seen some horrendous mistakes made by people who don’t know what they are doing."

I think the real problem is that journalists (and journalism professors) keep pounding a square peg into a round hole and then complaining about the fit.

People in general are not clamoring to become amateur journalists. Publishers: Chill out. This is not a way for you to get free labor, cut the newsroom staff, and preserve your margins.

That's not the point.

People want to participate in a community conversation. We can build a separate and new business model around facilitation of that online conversation.

That conversation is good for traditional journalism because it builds social capital -- connections, roots -- and interest in local civic life.

And by becoming participative listeners in those online conversations, our professional reporters can get a deeper insight into the community, a better read on what people think is important. They can collect leads, practical tips on stories that need to be pursued. They can do a better job.

And they can put a more human face on the journalism process, helping repair the newspaper brand.

We need to stop confusing ourselves about participative media. Yes, there is significant overlap between the social functions of traditional journalism and the social functions of partitipative media and community conversation. But they are not the same thing, they are not replacements for one another, and we should all stop the sniping from the respective camps.

Last year Tom Grubisch examined a number of local "citizen journalism" projects and declared that what he found, "apart from a couple of honorable exceptions, is the Internet equivalent of Potemkin villages -- an elaborate façade with little substance behind it."

A year later he reexamines these projects for OJR.org. He finds some signs of progress, but also has some harsh criticisms.

Meanwhile, writing for NAA's Presstime monthly magazine Michael Snyder takes a look at several newspaper-related projects. (I am quoted in both pieces.)

Update:Also note the Kelsey Group has an interview with Backfence CEO Susan DeFife.