Newspapers need to learn that great online communities should not be dictatorships

The what? I asked.

"Yeah, we have a standards and practices committee," he said. "We're supposed to figure out policies about managing user-generated content, hyperlinking and stuff like that."

Why don't you just crowdsource that? I asked.

He rolled his eyes, said "I know," then proceeded to detail some of the reasons why the paper's old guard had shot down his proposal to do just that. The reasons boiled down to two: 1) We don't trust outsiders to know what we ought to be doing, so 2) we're not comfortable letting "outsiders" influence decisions about internal operations.

What a wasted opportunity. What better way to help readers feel part of a community with the paper than to ask those readers to help craft the community's rules?

And how arrogant, at the same time. While newspaper journalists and managers might not yet understand them, the online community into which newsrooms are entering does have established conventions for linking and conversing. Good ones, too.

I know that many news reporters have struggled with writing hypertext. At most papers, reporters have just given up and leave the hyperlinking to automated tools on the paper's website. (Which can leads to hysterical results, such as a New York Times feature on Pasadena, Calif. that initially linked references to the city's Colorado Boulevard to... a Times archive of stories about the state of Colorado.)

But the Web offers newsrooms thousands of readers, and could-be readers, who've been writing hyperlinks into stories for years. Many more have been reading linked text, and understand the conventions of the form. Why not ask them for advice?

You can't hyperlink every noun with a website -- writers must preserve the usability of their work. Experienced bloggers can share their advice on when to link, as print vets can raise some of the questions that they need to consider. Fairness, for example. What happens when you want to link to an elected official's website? Do you link to her office's page, or her campaign website? It could depend upon the context of the story.

In the give and take, print veterans making the transition to online can do so with experienced guidance, while readers can learn more about the decisions reporters make when deciding what to include, or exclude, from a news story.

Same with handling user-generated content. If I've learned anything from running reader-driven discussion sites over the past decade, it is that the readers are themselves the most fierce defenders of good discussion communities. They've seen too many communities wrecked by poor oversight, inconsistent moderation and ill-conceived software. Let them tell you what they want from a discussion community, and what should happen to folks who don't comply.

Trust me, the even the most Web-savvy newspaper newsrooms can't offer a fraction of experience with and passion for online publishing that a reader community can. Publishers need readers, but readers online have so many choices that they don't need to go where they are not wanted, or even where they are not courted.

So why not court them?

Let me anticipate another objection to crowdsourcing your practices: the spam, outrage and babbling that infects so many newspaper.com comment sections and message boards. Open up and ask for advice, and you're giving your readers the chance to upload with every petty grievance and conspiracy theory they have.

Let 'em. Let 'em get it all out; suffer the indignity of it all, but don't shut down the board and quit. Show your readers that you have no fear of their voice, and that you will work with them to take out the garbage and build a better community that works for everyone, newsroom and readers alike.

Related stories: crowdsourcing, newsroom convergence, social media

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