Citizen engagement
I've been away from the computer today and tomorrow and most of the evening. That said, I see via Dan Gillmor that the Center for Citizen Media has released its report, Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement. Full disclosure: I haven't read it beyond a scan of the executive summary and what it says about the News & Record.
But writer Lisa Williams is insightful as ever. I plan to dig into it with gusto as soon as I can.
So what's the advantage of the arm's length approach Greensboro has taken to blogging? For one thing, it allows all the participants in the conversation to have the maximum degree of freedom and control. Bloggers have the freedom to say what they wish on their own blogs, and control what gets said on their own Weblog or Weblog comment section, if they wish to; and the paper also enjoys the same freedom and control. The end result is a blogging community with a great deal of vibrancy and little of the hesitancy that comes from two groups of people who are still working out an uncertain set of rules.
And,
It's precisely this kind of intensity, cooperation, and competition that has created such a vital civic and news community in Greensboro. It's hard to imagine such vitality out of any "walled garden" community on a canned platform hosted by either a news organization or a Web startup. Having many independently controlled sites has led to a uniquely robust local blogosphere with dramatically different points of view, dense interlinking, and vivid, fast-moving conversation that in cases such as this one, actually changes the course of events. And by doing so, changes the news.
Read it. It says good things about Greensboro's blogging atmosphere.