But he’s wrong, too. Start-ups filled with people who’d be using social media and social networking tools don’t really need someone to show them the way; they can just trust their people to do the right thing. But large media companies, ones that have resisted social media (at least somewhat), do need a voice and they need a person pushing reporters and editors to understand what they need to do. They also need people — dedicated people, not catch as catch can like so many other newspaper projects — to help train the staff.

I know that I’m biased, since my job is just that, but even if it weren’t, I think I’d see the necessity. No one needed to explain Twitter to me, but I know that other people need help. There’s a whole range of experience in newsrooms with regard to social media. Some people just get it, others want to ignore it.  We need to get everyone comfortable in this new space, and putting one person in charge of doing just that makes sense.

He really likes a plan from the New York Times to allow people to buy sponsorships. I wrote about the other plan from the Times last week.

Sponsorship is a fascinating idea, and Outing suggests some cool things that people could be willing to pay for.

And that’s exactly what we need. Too many publishers and CEOs are looking backward to models that were tried and failed in the mid-90s. Instead of trying to do the same thing in a different way, why not try to do something different?

So I’ll ask: what novel ideas do you have to make newspapers profitable, and how would those ideas work?

It strikes me as a quintessentially New York solution, in that it reminds me of a taxi’s meter. And it might work for them. Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff that there needs to be a balance between too small a free period, which would drive people away, and too long, which wouldn’t get much revenue.

The Times is in a strong position, as they already make a lot of money from online ads. But not all local sites are. It could be that their sales staff isn’t good at selling online ads, or their advertisers don’t understand the value, but they aren’t able to claim much revenue from the Web.

So you can see why executives at local papers might be tempted to follow suit. But before we rush, lemming-like, to implement this (actually!) new idea, let’s have a think about it.

The Times is in a really great position in terms of content. They have fresh, constantly updated stories from all over the world, covering any topic you can imagine. You could spend hours roaming around the site, and, indeed, some people do. They also have hundreds of journalists filing stories. Do you?

Say you’re a mid-sized local paper with about a dozen reporters filing stories every day. You’ve convinced them to file early and often for the Web, and they’re doing that. On a good day, you add a few dozen stories during the day, covering breaking news, crime, traffic and local government. That appeals well to your base of readers, but your base is much smaller than that of the Times. And how long would it take to read all those stories?

Revenue models aren’t one-size-fit-all, as we should already know. This metering plan MIGHT work for very large, national papers with rich archives, lots of fresh content and many different topics to choose from. But for smaller papers, ones that have to compete with television stations or other media sources, it might end up driving people into the arms of their competitors.

There are other models out there, which might fit better. (And I hope to talk more about some soon).

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.

Here’s the problem as I see it. Companies are letting you store information that they’re giving you — information you could get anyway — and telling you it’s yours. No, it isn’t. It’s yours if you had a hand in creating it, or some vested stake in it, or some part in the conversation.

In some cases you do have that. MyStarbucks Idea is a place for consumers to kvetch or just make suggestions. And you can immerse yourself in a “subtly branded experience” on myCoke.

But in a lot of cases, it’s still about the company addressing you, and maybe you getting to make a comment or two. Just because you use the prefix “my” doesn’t mean you care about consumers, just like using the prefix “i” doesn’t mean you put the care into your product that Apple does.

It helps as a signifier, sure, but it also smacks of opportunism (a point noted in the NYT article). And face facts, the kids are moving away from MySpace. It’s still popular, sure, but if we’re really trying to reach the younger demographic, we need to appeal to them, not appeal to what they used to like.

Tom Altman (and others) keep saying that the ideal is to give people a place to have a conversation. Some people have coined the term “wedia” and I like that, although it’s not very euphonious. How about “our”? Our___ could have a nice ring to it.

But rather than picking out a prefix of any kind, how about actually giving users a place to have a conversation, to contribute and to get the content they want?