Scott Carp, over on publishing 2.0, has a good post up about USA Today noting the disconnect between the praise of the new design by bloggers and social media commentators, and the negative comments from the actual readers of the paper. It's a good reminder that real people tend to react quite differently from the early adopters. I tend to agree w/ Scott when he says:
Could it be that it’s really the social media revolutionaries who “don’t get it” when they assume that what the people want is to rise up against the media autocracy and take control, when in fact what most people want is to get high quality information from a reliable source?
The key phrase here is "reliable source." We need more, not fewer, authoritative sources. Nobody is currently better at filling this gap than the existing media. At the same time, there is clearly room for improvement. For example, on eBay, getting good scores for customer service and trust is important, and drives higher sales. So the ability to say a specific reporter or columnist has stories that are useful/factual, etc., would also be a good tool for readers to use as they look for that authoritative voice. That's an example of using community involvement in a good way. Per my previous posts, having people vote on how much they think stories are important really doesn't do much for me...