Rich Gordon at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University,
has written a great piece on the opportunity for newspapers and magazines to build online communities.
Gordon says:
Online communities, it seems to me, are still mostly a missed
opportunity for newspapers and most other traditional media companies
One key reason is that media companies have the "If all you have is a
hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. These companies consider
themselves to be content publishers, so they've seen the Web primarily
as a publishing medium. It's people and companies unencumbered by a
publishing mindset that have built the great online community sites
such as MySpace, YouTube, Slashdot, and eBay (a community site as well
as an auction site).
Another problem for publishing is an
unwillingness to devote real resources and expertise to online
communities. News organizations seem to think that content creation is
the only job worth devoting staff time to. But enabling story comments
or establishing message boards isn't enough. Communities, online or
off, need staff attention. Without one or more people to provide
leadership, guidance, support, and a willingness to respond to or
delete off-topic or hostile comments, many online communities lie
barren or descend into name-calling and profanity.
This
issue of devoting adequate resources to community interaction is a serious
one for publishers. They employ lots of people (journalists) who define
their value in terms of the content they create. Ironically, these
people have many of the skills needed to build and run communities -
the ability to communicate clearly and in an engaginging way, to see
patterns and pull out the key points from large buckets of information,
to persuade people to tell their stories. But they need to change what
they do if they are to use these skills to build communities. As well
as creators of content they need to be curators, guiding users to the
good stuff, and "sowers of seeds", stimulating and nurturing discussion
and debate.
Gordon points out that the success of communities
usually depends on the activity of a small minority of the community,
the "super-users" who are the most active contributors and who help to
nurture and police the community. Learning how to attract and "grow"
these super-users is critical.
Gordon finishes off his piece with some pearls of wisdom and a list of resources for community builders.
