Smarter people than me are weighing in, but I think I might be able to add something to this conversation, since I’m training the staff at The Gazette on using social media.

My two-line social media policy:

If you’re using an account for work purposes, identify yourself as an employee of The Gazette.

If posting something would embarass you or the company, or call your professional reputation into question, DON’T POST IT.

That’s it. I give out pages of best practices, too, but those two get to the heart of the issue. Just as we would have never in the past expressed a political preference, we should refrain from doing so now. if it seems like common sense, it kinda is, but it still bears repeating.

The biggest issue people seem to be taking with the WSJ policy is that it shuts down transparency. It forbids staffers from discussing how a story was reported, written or edited. Bad advice, and among the reasons so many newspapers are failing at social media. When there was one edition a day, the story was all that mattered. Now, reporters need to be transparent at all stages. How they source and write the story is important, and so is the discussion afterward.

Rather than grasping and trying to control something (since no one’s been able to control falling readership or declining revenue), newspaper executives need to trust their reporters, calm down and embrace social media.

I can’t close any more eloquently than Patrick Thornton did.

Just use common sense, and common sense says not being social on social media doesn’t make much sense at all.

There’s been a lot more talk about making people pay for online content recently. Dean Singleton made a big deal of that at the AP conference, and has now announced a plan to make people do just that.

It’s a bad idea, one I made fun of and Jeff Jarvis did an intelligent take down of. I could keep making jokes at Singleton’s expense (and still might, actually), but I also want to explain why this idea is so wrong-headed.

The argument is that people pay for content when they buy a newspaper, so they should do the same when they read content online. I’ve been wondering how much people actually pay per story in the newspaper.

Between May 4 and May 8, The Gazette published 335 stories (collections of briefs are counted as one story). That works out to an average of 67 each day. A few years ago, that would have been much higher, but with cutbacks, that sounds about right for a mid-sized daily in a small city. The Gazette’s newsstand price is $0.75 per issue. That means if you bought the paper at your favorite convenience store, you paid an average of about $0.01 per story. In weeks where the number of stories is higher, you’d be paying under that. If you subscribe, that number will come down even further. That penny doesn’t go toward reporting and writing the stories, either. It goes toward the (many) costs to make the physical newspaper.

But who reads all those stories? Some do, I know, but I certainly don’t, and I’m not alone. I read stories that I already know will be interesting to me. But when you’re buying a paper, you have to buy the whole thing, not just the news or sports sections. Online, there’s no such requirement. And who is willing to pay for stories they’re not going interested in?

Now think about how much it costs to publish a newspaper every day. Presses, workers, paper and ink all cost money, not to mention paying people to plan routes and then deliver the papers. The paper shows up at your door, and that’s why you’re willing to pay for it.

You have to seek out—at least somewhat—news stories online, and it doesn’t cost the company nearly as much to publish or display them. So what’s the justification for charging?

I don’t have good figures about the exact daily cost of printing a newspaper (does anyone? I’d love to hear them), but let’s be generous and say it costs twice as much to print a paper than to display it online (I bet that number is closer to five times more expensive). That makes each story online worth about $0.005. How do you collect that? How do you handle readers who feel the story didn’t deliver what the headline promised and want their money back? And, more importantly, isn’t it time to figure out a truly new business model, one that might actually work and help media companies survive, instead of hastening their death?

The story itself is very simple, and the writing isn’t anything special. But I think it is a good example of what we can do, at least to start out.

And it taps into the ultra-local market, which is the place newspapers need to be.