Interesting experiment

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is turning its opinion pages into a continuously updated blog. A blog, how revolutionary! Talking about coming to the party late. Maybe this will turn out to be a success, but I am a skeptic. This is the set up of the experiment:

"We’ll start each weekday with a post that will summarize the discussion that takes place at our daily Editorial Board meeting and invite readers to comment on the issues we plan to write about. Those online discussions will inform — and sometimes influence — our opinions."

I actually find the whole concept of pontificating editorial boards an antiquated one, so while I applaud the Trib for requesting input from its readers, I think newspapers ought to consider getting rid of them altogether and just run authored columns instead. I realize that many may disagree, but newspapers' editorials do not matter that much anymore, yet the editorial boards keep acting as if they do. I find it a bit sad, really. Take the above statement, in all its magnanimousness, the wise men and women of the editorial board have decided to have their opinions informed and -brace yourself- even sometimes influenced by what their readers write. Next thing you know, they will allow their readers to vote.

The tragedy, of course, is that their readers have not waited for the editorial boards to finally climb down from their ivory towers and listen to the rumblings of the common folks. The commoners went off and started blogging and "citizen-journalisming" on their own, for better or worse. I write this with a fair amount of cynicism, because I do think that newspapers had the opportunity to capitalize on this untapped resource ten years ago, when they still had a tighter grip on their audiences.

Around the turn of the century, as a young graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I was doing research on people posting on the message boards of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. People were discussing politics and public policy issues in a very interesting way, somewhat more vitriolic perhaps than what we were used to see in the letters to the editor section, but with passion and commitment. I tracked their conversations, sent some of the users online questionnaires and theorized -as many other grad students in the late nineties- about the potential of this new public sphere for journalism. My research was hardly groundbreaking and flawed in many ways, but it made me think about the potential of the Internet as a way for newspapers to feel the pulse (or at least "a" pulse) of their communities. This was also at a time when "public journalism" was making waves in newsrooms and academia. At one point, and my memory is vague here, I and some other graduate students were at some sort of panel with an editor of one of the two Twin Cities papers. I told him about my "research" and asked him if he saw any potential for newspapers in those messageboards as a way to engage in a community dialogue. He scoffed and quickly dismissed the idea stating that the Internet would never be able to fulfill this role. Granted, I was a bratty young grad student trying to tell a veteran editor how to do things, so I deserved the smack down. But I also think that this stubborn underestimation of the power of the Internet by editors with a lack of vision and an overdose of arrogance at least partly explains why so many newspapers are still playing catch up with new technology, even today.