Editorial Page 2.0
May 1st, 2008 | by Brad King |I don’t want to be one of those people who sits back, lobbing grenades simply to see what happens after the explosion. For this to be worthwhile in any manner, it seems like I need to articulate a vision for Newspaper 2.0.
I’ve been outlining ideas for a sports section, business section and local section with a few people. I’ll get to those in a bit.
The most obvious place to start, though, seem to be the editorial page. This is the place where newspapers set their agenda, discuss what they think is important in the community and state their opinion for everyone to see.
In other words, it’s the antithesis of what an editorial page should be.
Here’s how I would set it up:
Obviously, the editorial page should have some control over the content on the page. That means they — like the rest of the community — get to make their case for what’s wrong and what should be done to fix it.
The site, though, shouldn’t be restricted to a simple comments section. Instead, there should be two technological additions.
- A Ning-type social networking site that allows people to form groups around a particular issue (which means editorials would need to be more than simply one-offs). The Social Network allows for people to form their own subgroups, invite other people, talk, and format the discussion on a personal basis
- A Meetup.com link that enables people to get together, meet and discuss issues about the editorial.
If it’s a call to action, which I think most editorials should be, then you should see some movement in the digital sphere.
The Ning-Meetup components combine a real world-digital world connection, which means that not everyone has to be a die-hard web user to be included. We saw during the Howard Dean campaign how effective Meetup can be.
From the online group, though, I would do more than just invite stories. I would have competitions to encourage people to write follow-ups to the original editorial (or editorial groups), letting the community self-select those that are deemed most valuable.
Out of that, the editorials can then be used to follow not only what is going in terms of the idea discussed, but also in terms of what the community is doing in response.
There are rules for creating a community (I’ll post these some time). We know what it takes to build Commons. One of them is giving people incentive to contribute — paying them for developing a network and thought, which is agreed upon by the group, and then publishing their article is one way.
It removes some of the power of the editorial board — but only if you classify power as controlling scarcity.
If power is becoming a supernode — then you’ve made yourself more relevant.
