Writing Hurts

I was having a discussion the other day about how people group themselves. We were talking about a group of one. After all, how many people fall into the exact same category that you do? For example, I’m in my late 20s, a newlywed, I live in Cedar Rapids, I work in newspapers, and I have a deep and abiding love of shiny new gagdets. There are more ways I could classify myself, but those’ll work for now.

How many other people would match that description, let alone a yet more specific one? Not many, to be sure. But I don’t want to find my exact match, I want to find people who are interested in some of the same things I am. Newspapers need to find a way to offer their readers a way to connect with readers with other people with some of the same interests. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are great. They give people a way to connect.

But people are interested in news stories, too, and if a newspaper could give them a forum to read the stories they want to and then discuss them with like-minded people, they would be able to really build a community on their Web sites.