The latest from Pew: 48 million Americans have posted content to the Internet. The majority of them are broadband users, and broadband penetration jumped by 40 percent between March 2005 and March 2006. Significantly, broadband penetration in households with income between $40,000 and $50,000 grew by 68 percent.
Editors, please listen. If you're not rethinking your entire content strategy around participative principles, you're placing your future at risk.
Every newspaper's website can, and should, be the center of online community -- connections, sharing, conversation.
Few are.
Comments
Mainstream media still doesn't get it
Your absolutely right. Most of the mainstream media is still trying to simply transplant their print or broadcast model from what they have now, to the Internet without understanding social networking.
Those who do this, as you say, are placing their futures at risk.
great example is in San Diego, CA
A great example of participation is voiceofsandiego.org (http://www.voiceofsandiego.org). Our letters to the editor section has always been popular, so much so that these letter writers would begin to debate each other. We just finished our redesign, and gave our readers more ways to provide feedback. We have a reader's forum and then at the end of each commentary article, readers can provide feedback directly on the site. They love it.
We've embraced the participative principles, and it works.