Unlike my other work, I pitched the heck out of this series. Tim O’Reilly praised my efforts, but it was buried in his comment stream, and overall I was 3 for 19. And it went nowhere.

This comment you quoted from Yelvington is fitting here: “Print journalists suck at promotion.” (tell that to Tom Friedman). No, it’s just that there’s a limited attention span. And if journalists suck at promotion, bloggers are too willing to be suckers at it, and not really dedicate time to the important underlying issues.

I suspect that is because we, as an industry, have developed a collective reticence to exposing our shortcomings in public. Why give the press critics out there ammunition by posting a comment that reveals your, or your organization’s, discomfort with community building?

So we talk only to other news industry professionals at conferences (e.g. ONA), or send private messages to those in the industry who seem to be in the know. (And I do get plenty of those.)

Talking to other old-media folks doesn’t bring much fresh knowledge into the industry, however. And one-to-one, private conversations, even with smart, well-experienced folk, often do not move the learning process as swiftly as a robust, open debate with multiple, well-articulated points of view can.

So… it is 2007 and most news organizations *still* lag solo bloggers and discussion forum leaders in building engaged and loyal discussion communities.

Discussions work because someone is not afraid to stand in front of the community and say “I need help.” Too many journalists have too much ego to do that. Which drives me nuts, since the very essence of good reporting is *asking for help*: for information, for perspective, for comment and for advice.

And since we, collectively, have such a hard time *participating* in public discussion communities, we end up doing such a lousy job of running them.

As I tell other journalism educators – a students – one cannot learn to report news if one does not first follow it. One can’t write books who doesn’t first read them. One can’t make a good movies if you don’t watch many first. And one can’t run a decent discussion community if you haven’t spent a great deal of time participating in them.

How many journalists do that?

We don’t need to spent big bucks hiring experienced discussion leaders as consultants (though, as a discussion leader, that’d be nice….) We do need to get on their freakin’ boards and start *doing* this stuff.

Clay Shirky wrote about the dynamics of online forums a few years back in his very important and spot-on essay, “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy”:

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Lots of us who’ve been online and in forums for a long time have seen these things happen–perhaps not to the extreme degree as the public official with the multiple identities, but these things truly aren’t mysteries, surprises or anything new to anyone who’s been in forums, newsgroups, etc. for awhile. (it’s just a surprise when someone who’s in a position of power–such as an elected official or a highly regarded journalist–does something like this.)

and it’s not necessarily a back-end or software issue. It’s a people issue. People do stuff for reasons lots of us can’t really fathom–possibly because we’re not in their shoes.

Still, I sure do wish that newspapers would do themselves and their communities a great service by not just tweaking and posting where visible their community rules, but also by hiring or consulting with seasoned forum moderators. There’s no reason for papers to be flailing around trying to re-invent the wheel when there’s plenty of people who already know how to build and maintain all kinds of wheels.