What, she wanted to know, could she do to save the small, local paper that covers the town her college is in? Buying advertising, of course, would help, but most of the students come from elsewhere, and there’s only so much money for advertisements, anyway. She buys what she can. And she subscribes, of course, for what that’s worth.

There are some variables I don’t know: who owns the paper (chain or individual), how big the circulation is, etc. This isn’t a solve for X kinda thing. Every successful paper is successful in its own way.

And anyway, that isn’t the interesting question to me. I want to know: What responsibility, if any, do outside institutions, both public and private, and citizens have to newspapers? Papers are, of course, private businesses: they exist to make a profit for their owners. But they also serve (or SHOULD serve) the public good by keeping people informed and contributing to a lively discourse about current events.

Having worked at papers that made money (sadly not many of them nor much money) and lost money, I can’t think of a single publisher who would accept help from someone outside. Of course, I also don’t know any publishers who were lining up for a newspaper bailout, but plenty of them were.

As much as we should all be concerned with keeping local businesses afloat, I don’t think anyone has a moral obligation to buy something bad or even support a poorly-run business. And face it, so many newspapers have been badly run for so long that it’s hard to have sympathy for their owners. The people who work for them and lose their jobs, sure, but not the owners. They, for the most part, did this to themselves.

The PR person’s point about good journalism being essential to a democracy is well-taken, but the news media no longer has (if it ever really did have) a monopoly on good journalism. So what can a private citizen do to help save a newspaper? Probably nothing. But he or she CAN do some things to help save journalism. Start a blog about your town. Take it seriously, attend council meetings and write about what’s happening. Don’t be a town booster or a knee-jerk contrarian. Be fair. If you see something egregious happening, write about it. Same goes for something great. Share it with your friends. Encourage them to write something or to at least share it with their friends.

So how is going to competing with a newspaper going to save it? It won’t, probably, but it might keep them honest. And it will do a few things for you: First, it will give you a new appreciation of what it takes to put out a newspaper. And second, it might help keep the idea of journalism and the spirit of public-mindedness alive. Which is why you wanted to save the newspaper in the first place, right?

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.

The lesson: You do so at your peril.

I’m not sure if this is a British thing or a newspaper thing. I don’t know many places that wouldn’t even bother to post such comments, though I do know many that would simply ignore it. Or, worse yet, not even bother to read it.

The commenters aren’t just addressing each other; sometimes they’re addressing us, as well. And maybe they’re wrong or biased. But maybe they’re right. It’s our responsibility to make sure we figure out which is the case, and if we’re wrong, we need to fix it quickly.

Otherwise, we could find ourselves making enemies.

Talk about a lesson we all need to hear, but should have already learned. Media companies are often paralyzed because we hold up an ideal for our content that we can’t meet — at least not at first. When we the last time you were good at anything you’d only tried a few times?

Takeaway lesson: you’ll never be perfect at something you don’t try.

So what are you waiting for?

Now if you did all of the parts of every step for every story, you’d be accused of not being productive enough. But I think reporters could learn a lot about the different ways to find and disseminate information, and there’s a lot of really great ideas in the post.

So what have you done to bring your reporting more into line with Web 2.0?

The site has a bunch of videos now, of varying levels of production quality, ranting or raving about Crocs. It’s an unusual idea for a company, to give hate the same billing as love. But it makes sense.

There are a lot of places for people to spew hate on the Internet, so why not try and corral it when you can?

And for newspapers, it’s even more useful. We are — and we should be — polarizing. People will be angry about our editorials and have opinions about our stories. Why not give them a place to talk? It would be useful to find out what people are thinking and what we might need to change.

There will inevitably be the usual trolling: OMG yr paper is teh sux0rz! Die plz. Kthxbai

The Crocs site doesn’t have to deal with that as much, because they set a relatively high bar to entry. But we can igore the useless comments and work on fixing the problems we find. It helps to follow Chip Scanlan’s advice to Be a sponge, be a duck.

So are any papers out there giving people a place to talk specifically about the issues they have with the paper?

The points made are pretty valid: commenters are often rude, off-topic or both. Newspapers would never publish much of what’s said in comments on their editorial pages, and people are allowed to hide behind pseudonyms.

The writer makes the argument that newspapers should be in the news business and blogs should be in the business of trafficking in comments. But that misses the point. Comments, no matter how nasty, are a useful addition to newspaper stories.

Comments are not a conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are lots of ways to have conversations on the Internet, and newspapers are looking to add more all the time. But the gut-level reaction that stories provoke is worth giving its own forum.

Take our recent live coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cedar Rapids.

One person wants to know why we’re bothering, when people could just read about the visit in the next day’s paper. I’ll leave you to absorb the irony of making such a comment on a Web site.

Others spend a lot of time arguing about Obama’s merits,  in sometimes crude terms. But they’d be doing that anyway. We’re just letting those comments take place out in the open.

That’s part of the new mission of the media. We’re not just telling people what’s happening anymore, we need to listen to what they have to say, as well.

We need to do more to foster real conversations and to make sure the trolls don’t take over. But that doesn’t mean we should stop letting people comment on our stories.

He likes it a lot, but others are at best indifferent. I fall firmly in the second camp, and I’ve helped to start a webcast for a newspaper once. More than a year ago, this was the Next Big Thing. Places like the Roanoke Times led the curve with them, and won all kinds of awards.

But, as mentioned in the comments, the Times’ webcast is dead. It didn’t get traction with viewers or advertisers, only getting a few hundred hits per episode. Maybe the paper isn’t big enough, with a circulation of about 100,000.

Or maybe there’s a bigger issue: Webcasts don’t work for newspapers.

It doesn’t matter if they’re well-produced or just ape TV news, it’s the wrong format. Daily casts like rocketboom.com worked (when they did) because they had a fresh, funny take on the news delivered by a recognizable personality.

But this post about the death of Roanoke’s webcast also brings up a good point: people don’t go on the Web to have stories bundled together, they go online to pick out interesting stories.

That’s where video shines: one-topic, short videos. If you’re good and can build an audience, that will drive much more traffic than a Webcast ever will.

The name came from Gazette editor Steve Buttry, and is a pretty good description. I’ll be helping move the paper toward becoming more interactive.

The idea is that we need to implement features to get our readers more involved. It’s not the only tool in the tool box, but giving people a place to come together is a way we can start to help foster community.

I’ll be blogging about what we’re trying, what works and what doesn’t, and the long road toward our vision. Should be a fun ride.

We worry about leaking our enterprise stories too early, we don’t always follow stories with consistent updates, and, let’s face it, there are a lot of newspaper sites that are hard, if not impossible to navigate.

And the points he makes are valid. Changing the link structure is a great way to make sure no one sees a story again, and making readers login is a great way to make sure no one sees a story in the first place. Online analytics have come far enough that you don’t need to have a list of registered users, you can find out how many people are actually reading and go from there.

But the best point he has is one we should have gotten a long time ago: we need to stick with what we know best. A Web site isn’t like a newspaper, and the idea of a monolithic information provider is dead. So why do so many papers keep bombarding readers with wire copy they can get elsewhere. That space could be better used to showcase more of our local expertise, and to get good stories in front of more eyes.