A couple of recent launches highlight just how much participation has become part of the mainstream.
Boston got a fourth daily newspaper this week, its second free daily, with the launch of BostonNow. Most free metro (lower case M) dailies have been slow to come to grips with the participative nature of the net, but this one comes right out of the gate with a focus on the Web: Blogs for everyone (at least, as soon as they get Wordpress working) and, for people with way too much time on their hands, a live webcast of the daily 1pm news meeting. Editor John Wilpers, who is writing about all of this on Blogspot, promises to pick up the lead paragraphs of the best blogs for printing in the paper, with pointers back to the Web.
Chicago's Sun-Times group, which now includes an impressive stack of suburban weeklies and dailies, has begun rolling out a series of hyperlocal participative websites under the NeighborhoodCircle.com brand. It, too, is a work in progress -- as I write this, only Montgomery, Oswego and Yorkville (all fairly distant from the city core) are launched, and earlier this week some of the Yorkville pages linked to Oswego, but they're working on it. They have the usual set of features including blogs, community calendar and photo galleries for all.
Neither site has any social networking functionality -- the buddy lists and personal profile/self-expression pages that are at the heart of sites like MySpace.com. We and our friends in Bakersfield have both found social networking tools to be a very worthwhile addition.
Of the two, NeighborhoodCircle may have the more difficult challenge. BostonNow.com is launching at the same time as the newspaper, and will naturally benefit from joint promotional efforts and the "shiny new toy" syndrome. The Chicago effort has a brand that is distinct from the motley collection of newspaper names that are behind it. It will need a tremendous promotional and community development effort -- not just a few in-paper ads -- to establish the buzz necessary to get an interactive community site up and running.