(Rich Gordon)

Over the course of U.S. history, local news media have served two functions: They have provided facts (for instance, what the City Council did last night), and they have provided a forum for opinions (editorials, columns and letters commenting on what the council did).

In the early years of American newspapers, the forum function was dominant. Newspapers served as a place for conversation and debate, and some papers filled page after page with letters from readers. But by the mid-20th century, as the number of papers declined, what communications scholar James Carey called "the model of conversation" was displaced by "the model of information." Journalism became defined mostly as reporting and conveying facts; opinions were banished to a heavily edited page or two of the paper.

For local news Web sites, it's time to go back to our conversational roots. Providing a forum for healthy debate on issues of local concern is important for news organizations to remain relevant and to serve the public interest in a democratic society. Beyond that, in this era of "social media" on the Web, it should be abundantly clear by now that conversation, not facts, is what drives digital media usage.

It's true that most local news Web sites now allow commenting on articles, but no one - not publishers, newsrooms, journalists or the public - is satisfied with the results. Comment threads too often become platforms for ranting, hostility and racism rather than dialogue and debate.

In part, this is because news organizations have been unwilling to invest in better technology - better tools already exist for managing online conversations - and to allocate staff time to cultivating and facilitating the discussion. But there have been some other, more fundamental problems: The core online audience wasn't the core audience for news, Web pages were cumbersome software interfaces, and the anonymity of the Web often led to incivility. These problems made it very difficult to form a genuine "online community" based on news conversation.

News flash! These fundamental problems are going away - or at least, the context is changing dramatically. A "revolution in social software" - predicted more than five years ago in a widely linked essay by Clay Shirky - is now upon us. (For more reflections on this essay, see my post for the PBS Idealab blog earlier this week.)

The forces driving this revolution underlie the Crunchberry Project, the innovation class involving six Medill master's students that I'm co-directing this quarter. The class is developing a new Web site designed to encourage young adults to interact with each other around local news. (Two of the students are "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on scholarships funded by the Knight News Challenge).

The Crunchberry team aims to take advantage of the following trends:

The "digital natives" are coming of age. The first generation that can't remember the days before home computers is now in high school and college. Social interaction has always been a high priority for young people; it's not surprising that they are the pioneers in the use of social technologies such as instant messaging, text-messaging on cellular phones and sites such as Facebook and MySpace. As they get older, local news - and local, news-based conversation - should become more relevant to them.

The time and costs required for Web development have plummeted. For starters, the cost of hardware, software, bandwidth and other services have dropped dramatically. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson (whose blog is a must-read for people interested in digital media and business) says these costs are one-tenth of what they were a decade ago. Moreover, Web software frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django (what the Crunchberry developers are using) allow the development of fully functional Web sites in a very short time. Illustrating what's now possible: Wilson says several companies in his firm's investment portfolio have built a base of 10 million to 20 million users with a full-time staff of fewer than five people.

Advances in Web technology now enable rich interactive experiences that weren't possible with simple HTML pages. As a heavy online user who's been involved in Web development for more than a dozen years now, I have watched with interest as the Web has evolved from static pages to interactive environments. But the Crunchberry Project has really brought home how dramatically things have changed thanks to technologies such as AJAX. Information can update without refreshing the page. Content can be superimposed on top of a page without launching a separate browser window. Basically, whatever you can imagine in a software interface can now be built on a Web page. This wasn't true as recently as three years ago. The Crunchberry site has some cool features that take advantage of these new tools.

Online social networks are fundamentally changing how we meet people, stay in touch with those we know, and discover interesting content. Part of my job for the past year and a half has been to direct a new initiative at Northwestern's Media Management Center exploring the impact of social networks on the future of media. Initially, I saw Facebook and MySpace as just a modernized version of "online communities," which have existed since before the Web was invented. I was skeptical that they would have much impact on the creation and distribution of content. I'm not skeptical any more. It seems clear to me that social networks are quickly becoming an essential tool for interpersonal communication - and for alerting us to interesting Web content.

Our digital identities - and social networks - are becoming portable. I wrote about this trend in an Idealab post and this blog, focusing on the impact of Facebook Connect as well as other tools that are designed to let people connect with their social networks on many different Web sites. This capability potentially solves one of the most perplexing issues in online communities: the need for persistent user identities and reputations. The Crunchberry site is built to integrate with Facebook Connect, which is getting a flurry of coverage this week on sites as diverse as TechCrunch and NYTimes.com. But Facebook Connect is not the only way to integrate a Web site with social networks. Google, MySpace and Yahoo! have comparable tools.

The Web site designed and built by the Crunchberry team will be finished this month. Gazette Communications, the media company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that has been working with the class, plans to launch it for testing in early 2009. I don't know what will happen when real people start to use the site, but I am confident it offers some new ideas and approaches for building conversations and community around local news.


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