The other day, Genghis Conn, from Connecticut Local Politics wrote about The Greenwich Time and the Stamford Advocate being sold to Gannett. He worried about how the papers would fare and I spoke about my optimism for the papers. He asked me why and I gave a brief comment there. Let me take a few moments to expand on those comments.

Back in January, I attended the Journalism that Matters conference in Memphis. This was a gathering of people that care deeply about the future of journalism in this country. The crowd was mostly editors and journalism professors, with a few ‘new media’ types thrown in to liven things up.

One participant was Karen Magnuson, who is editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and president of the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME). The Democrat and Chronicle has been part of Gannett since 1928 and Rochester was the headquarters of Gannett for many years. Karen spoke about how the Democrat and Chronicle was working hard to promote greater participation in the newspaper by its readers.

Then, while I was down in DC to cover Libby Trial deliberations, I had some really good discussions with Richard Willing, who works for USA Today. He spoke about how folks at USA Today were working hard to figure out how to best to change their approach to the Internet.

Then, last Friday, USA Today had this article.

Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events.

I signed up with their social media tool and wrote my first blog post there. The software is provided by Pluck, and you can read their press release about their work with USA Today here.

While it is good to see that they have a social networking tool which includes RSS enabled blogs, it is disappointing to see that they don’t have a good way to find friends on USA Today. In addition, it would be great to be able to subscribe to articles written by specific journalists there. To complete the picture, I hope journalists working with Gannett will be able to and encouraged to use the social networking to tool find new sources and new leads for stories that matter.

Will any of these tools make it to the Stamford Advocate and the Greenwich Time? Will the USA Today social network be more than just a USA Today social network? Will it cover all the Gannett papers? I have userids on so many different papers, it would be great to have one userid for all the papers in the Gannett family. It would also make a lot of sense for their advertising. Imagine Gannett being able to microtarget advertisements the way Facebook has been able to.

When USA Today went to their new look, they received lots of unfavorable comments from their readers. They probably could have handled this better, especially in terms of making the site customizable. Allow people who want the old look to get the old look with a profile setting. Allow people to modify the layout of the news according to their needs. Have an online community developer who works hard to make sure readers are getting the experience they want. Make changes like this available as beta tests and encourage feedback.

Will they get it right? Will they tap into the collective intelligence of their readers? Will this propagate to my local papers? Will they be able to use this to make their advertising more effective and profitable? I hope so. A well funded newspaper that pays close attention to what its readers want and know is an important step in the direction of a news ecology in the twenty first century that is sustainable and hopefully of a higher quality, a quality worthy of the First Amendment.

(Cross posted at my USA Today Blog)