The Globe and Mail has created a new position, Communities editor, which is going to be filled by its technology writer Matthew Ingram.

As Ingram himself points out, even he is not quite sure what this means. But he has some ideas of the way forward:

It means a chance to apply some of those Web 2.0, “media is a conversation,” social-networking principles (the kind we started the mesh conference to talk about) to the newspaper that I work for, instead of just writing about what other content producers are doing. We’re talking about blogs, comments, interactive features, Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Some attempts will fail. Others (hopefully) will not. The reality is that creating communities doesn’t happen overnight.

His last point is particularly poignant. Developing a community is hard, as CBC Vancouver has found in its Your Community section on the CBC BC website.

The challenge for The Globe is the same one the CBC and other media organisations face – simply creating a space for community, hoping that people will come, does not work. The BBC has accepted it does not have to host the conversation on its website and Ingram suggests he will follow a similar approach:

As I told the senior editors at the Globe, in order for us to do this properly, we need to be committed to opening up our content in ways we haven’t even thought of — including some ways that might seem strange or contentious, and which could at least initially be met with considerable internal resistance. Among other things, we need to make it easier for people to find our content, share our content, link to our content and even make use of our content (in some cases to create their own content).

The idea of a reporter as a communities editor signals the evolving role of the journalist, going beyond the journalist as the gate-keeper. One new role, identified by Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is the journalist as a forum-leader, helping the audience engage in a discussion in a knowledgeable way.

Good luck to Matthew in redefining the role of the journalist.