Social Newspapers

I'm usually a bit skeptical about the concept of social networks. They seem to work best only with certain (young) demographics, and they seem to lose favor with their audiences rather quickly (cf. Friendster, Tribe and Orkut). I've never quite found a practical use for LinkedIn (and I'm not alone). Even the gold standard of social networking, MySpace, seems to be more about self-expression by its young-skewing audience than about social connections.

Having said that, I'm surprised newspapers haven't experimented more with social networking features. It seems to be a good way to tie together existing offline audiences (subscribers) and to give them the ability to exchange information and experiences. Even offering a profile and simple web page to every subscriber might be an interesting strategy for a newspaper. Going a step further and allowing those subscribers to talk amongst themselves, or to rate content and local businesses, would further cement the newspaper's ties to its community. The relationships already are there; social networking would allow newspapers to build upon them, for the community's good and its own.

There are a couple of interesting newspaper social-networking experiments: Bakotopia, one of the Bakersfield Californian's many interesting online projects, started off as a classifieds site and then added social networking. It has built quite a local following among the kind of young audience that newspapers crave (and desperately need). The Minneapolis Star-Tribune just launched the cleverly named vita.mn, which adds some social networking features to an otherwise fairly straightforward local entertainment site. And the Philadelphia Inquirer experimented a couple of years ago with a local social networking site based on Tribe's platform (disclosure: I was a consultant to Tribe on the project). That one never quite got off the ground, in part because it tried too hard to be a classifieds site rather than a social network.

There's still a lot of interesting work for newspapers to do in the social networking arena. Again, it's an interesting way to reconnect with existing audiences and make the newspaper more of a factor in readers' lives. With circulation declining, that's certainly a worthwhile goal!