newspapers

Despite the phenomenal growth and dominance of Myspace in social networking, there's still plenty of opportunity -- in the niches.

I think people play different social roles depending on whether they're interacting at work, with their neighbors, or in a Myspace-like global setting.

As a result, there's room for more social networks, and local social networking is an important opportunity that newspapers should be chasing.

I've been tooling around on Vita.mn, the new youth-focused entertainment website from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. It's good to see the Star Tribune back in the groove, breaking new ground.

There's a lot to like in this effort -- wiki-like collaborative "guides" authored by the community, a solid foundation of basic listings, calendaring, free tagging and social networking. And it's refreshingly fast. My only immediate complaint is that it doesn't do enough to celebrate its "people" functionality -- some of the cool stuff is quite buried.

In most newsrooms, if you chat long enough, someone will bring up the moldy old question: What about the digital divide?

Let's bury that.

Some 60 million U.S. households have Internet access. Daily newspapers reach only about 50 million households. Should we be talking about the print partition? The crushed-tree chasm?

Jakob Nielsen tackles the subject in his column this week, noting that falling prices for computer technology have demolished the "economic divide" argument.

Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design has boiled down 96 pages of Harvard Business School prose into bullet points. His bottom line for the N2 Blueprint for Transformation? "This thing is great. ... Go read it for yourself. All 96 pages."

Continuing my riff on the four keys to a great news website:

I stumbled across a great quote from the late Douglas Adams, who noted that we think everything invented before we were born is normal, everything invented before we were 30 is exciting, and everything invented after that is an offense against the natural order of things.

Kevin Anderson hits the nail squarely:

I'm sorry to see Dean Baquet lose his job as editor of the Los Angeles Times. I take no joy in the wholesale restructuring of the newspaper business that I see unfolding before us. But it's real, it's necessary and it's driven by economic and technological change beyond our control.