(Rich Gordon)

From the beginning of American newspaper history, journalism and community-building have been inextricably connected.

The first multipage newspaper in the American colonies, published in Boston in 1690, had three pages of content and a fourth page that was blank so readers could jot down their own news before passing the paper on to a friend. Benjamin Harris, the paper's publisher, might be described as the grandfather of what we're calling "citizen journalism" today. But that modern term fails to capture the complexity of the relationship between journalism and community.

Over 300-plus years since Harris published his only issue of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, we can see clearly that a sense of community is critical to the success of journalism. And that journalism can be an engine for nurturing and cultivating that sense of community. The interaction of journalism and community builds the strength of both.

So why is it that in the digital age -- when communities can form and strengthen through powerful tools ranging from discussion boards to social networking sites -- that U.S. newspapers have repeatedly missed the community opportunity?

As far back as 1983, when Knight Ridder launched its ill-fated Viewtron experiment to deliver text-based news and information to TV screens in Miami, newspaper companies have seen that online users have a powerful desire to interact with each other -- and in fact, are much more interested in interpersonal connection than in passively receiving the news.

Roger Fidler, who helped build the Viewtron service, would later write, "The services that consistently had the most loyal followers were the electronic mail and CB sections, which like citizen band radio made it possible for users to interact anonymously with each other in real time." Foreshadowing the rise of Web sites like MySpace and Facebook, Viewtron staff even noticed that the most frequent participants in online conversation were -- "judging from the content of the public messages" -- teenagers.

By the time Knight Ridder began building a presence on the World Wide Web (and when I was hired as the first online director at The Miami Herald), these lessons had been forgotten. Newspapers' initial online strategies focused on publishing print content online. While they've since added breaking news and begun to embrace user interactivity, most newspaper Web sites primarily enable one-way communication, from journalists to the audience. Meanwhile, we've seen wave after wave of technological innovations that enable and facilitate online conversation and community:

• The growth and now ubiquity of email for interpersonal communication;
• The rise of America Online, whose success was fueled largely by enabling online chats and discussions;
• The arrival of the first wave of online community Web sites (remember GeoCities?);
• The emergence of instant messaging online and text messaging on cellphones;
• The invention and increasing influence of blogs and the "blogosphere";
• Most recently, the creation of online social networks (MySpace, Facebook) and other "Web 2.0" services relying on community interaction and "user-generated content."

With each evolution of online community tools, newspapers have had an opportunity to tap into the power of interpersonal connections. Each time, the opportunity has largely been squandered -- and each time, the audience and business model for print newspapers have declined further.

All this history served as backdrop this spring as a team of Medill graduate students set out to explore the relationships among local communities, online communities and journalism. Their New Media Publishing Project class, sponsored by Yahoo!, has yielded a fascinating report entitled "Lights, Camera, Connect: Can the Web enhance local community?" I served as co-instructor for the class, along with Wil LaVeist, a digital publishing veteran who helped build AZCentral.com and BlackVoices.com. You can download the students' 79-page report in PDF form from Medill's Web site.

Before discussing the students' report, I'd like to take a stab at defining "community." As with so many terms that get thrown around in reference to the digital world ("convergence" and "interactivity," just to name two), the word potentially has many meanings.

The definition I like best comes from an out-of-print book, Derek Powazek's "Design for Community":

A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.

This definition nicely captures the key aspects of communities, online and offline: interpersonal interaction, shared experiences and the diversity of reasons that people choose to participate.

The Medill student project was strongly influenced by the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose well-known book "Bowling Alone" documented the decline of institutions such as PTAs, bowling leagues and bridge clubs that once brought people together and built "social capital" in local communities.

In an online excerpt from the book, Putnam traces the history of the term "social capital" and describes how it accumulates. The "private face" of social capital is evident when people form interpersonal connections for their own direct benefit -- say, by networking to find a job. The "public face" of social capital appears when these connections benefit the larger society. "If the crime rate in my neighborhood is lowered by neighbors keeping an eye on one another's homes, I benefit even if I personally spend most of my time on the road and never even nod to another resident on the street," Putnam writes.

Putnam also makes a useful distinction between "bonding" social capital and "bridging" social capital. Bonding social capital accrues when people associate based on shared identity and known common interests. It seems clear that most successful online communities fall into this category. Most of us participate in email lists or online forums organized around common interests, careers or activities -- for instance, online journalism. I gravitate to these communities because I am so much like the other people who participate, and I know that what they say will be relevant to me. Social networking sites such as Facebook take this a step further, by first linking people based on personal acquaintance. One thing that's great about the Internet is that it allows people with shared interests to interact even if we live far apart from one another.

Bridging social capital, by contrast, is built through connections between people who don't necessarily have much in common. Great newspapers have historically forged this kind of social capital by focusing public attention on issues and problems that weren't widely understood or acknowledged. Online, though, it's difficult to cultivate bridging social capital. Many newspapers have learned this lesson painfully when they created online discussion boards or invited comments on articles -- only to discover that conversations deteriorated into partisan bickering, racist ranting or juvenile name-calling. What they discovered is that shared interests are critical to generating civilized discourse.

The students' assignment set out to answer two questions: Can online tools support and enhance real-world communities? And, what role should media play in online communities? They surveyed Chicago-area community organizations and found one -- Chicago Filmmakers -- whose members seemed to have needs that online community tools could help fulfill. They sought to build social capital by using tools from Yahoo!, which controls -- among other sites and services -- the world's leading online community engine (Yahoo! Groups) and sites that facilitate social networking (Yahoo! 360) and the sharing of Web content (Del.icio.us), photos (Flickr) and multimedia (Yahoo! Video).

The students ended up being disappointed by the Yahoo! tools. They found that it was impossible for a group such as Chicago Filmmakers -- which offers filmmaking classes, runs independent film festivals and fosters a community of filmmakers in the Midwest -- to integrate these tools so members could interact in all the ways they might want to. (For instance, separate logins are required for many of the Yahoo! services.) Instead, the students used open-source community tools (Drupal and its modules) to build an entirely new Web site for the organization. Once the organization makes the switch from its old site (www.chicagofilmmakers.org) to the new one built by the students (www.chifilm.org), members of the organization will be able to share and critique video, post news of mutual interest and participate in online discussions.

The students concluded that media companies such as Yahoo! and newspapers could benefit by helping community organizations enhance their members' ability to interact online. They recommended to Yahoo! that the company reinvent Yahoo! Groups to make it easy for organizations to select from and integrate community tools. Since some groups are wary of losing control over their Web sites, the students also recommended that Yahoo! create a version of Yahoo! Groups that organizations could host on their own servers.

The students didn't find quick or easy solutions for newspapers interested in using online community tools to increase attention for local journalism. But there's plenty of evidence that news and information Web sites can build traffic substantially by facilitating interpersonal connections. The connection between Web site usage and online community shows up clearly in the Media Management Center's research on online experiences. (Note, especially, the importance of the "connects me with others" experience.) For an example of a newspaper doing this successfully, check out this case study I recently wrote for the Newspaper Association of America.

It's also worth noting that Yahoo! and many of the nation's newspapers have formed a broad-ranging partnership (described in this Yahoo! press release and New York Times story). The partnership is focused first on classified advertising and secondarily on sharing of content and traffic. Imagine that Yahoo! (with its strong online community tools but no local presence) and newspapers (with strong local ties but generally weak technology) could find a formula for collaboration in community-building -- online and off.

Whether or not newspapers deepen their partnership with Yahoo!, it seems clear that the decline in social capital described by Putnam is a key driver of shrinking newspaper readership over the past half-century. It's time -- or past time -- for newspapers to embrace online community-building as a foundation of their 21st century strategy.


By Rich Gordon (richgor@northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.