Print - Tuesday, November 4, 2008 11:33 - 3 Comments

The Globe appoints its first communities editor

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.

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