I was with a group of students today, an entrepreneurship class, undergrads, who seemed to take for granted that news in the future will be web-based, involving micropayments, and newspapers will die. None of them, however, pointed towards this kind of advantage with social media.

My favorite news outlet is Huffington Post, which goes to your point, but I'm biased because I post there.

But I have to admit that I also spend a lot of time with NYTimes, and there too, the comments are part of the medium. Look at the Freakonomics blog there, or David Pogue's areas, and you'll see conversation and dialog. And Paul Krug is often bringing and minding the conversation.

It's a new world. And I'm with you, I like it.

Tim

The result is kind of a diptych–two linked posts that form the basis of a dialog on an important subject (important to me, anyway).

This kind of collaboration is unique to social media. And that's one of the things that really annoys me when the MSM denigrates blogs as useful info sources.

Peer-to-peer, emerging dialog just doesn't happen in the MSM. It's one voice (with an editor in the background, perhaps). It's static.

Even when MSM outlets use blogs and other online capabilities, they enfeeble them. Newspapers put older articles (some as recent as 2 weeks old!) behind pay firewalls.

The New Yorker blogs, which are superbly written and insightful, as you'd expect, don't allow comments (!?!).

This to me is like purchasing a new car and refusing to use reverse gear. It's just crazy. (Perhaps fueled by fear of eating one's own tail, to bring it back to the subject of the dialog.)

Sorry to drag on, but I think your post highlighted one of the distinctive values of blogging & social media. It's one of the reasons fewer people buy newspapers, & more people are participating & creating their own information sources.

regards, John