Jeff Jarvis – CMS as Media Salvation. Not.:

“We should take inspiration from Doc Searls’ VRM (vendor relationship management) movement, figuring out how the public should manage us so we can serve them better. We should learn by example from Waze, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Craigslist, Facebook, et al and explore the value of offering platforms to communities so they can do what they want and need to do (“elegant organization,” Mark Zuckerberg calls that), with us adding journalistic value to the flow of information that now can exist without us.

If you have media ambitions and want to build an application, build something that is useful to the public, not us. No one in the public will value us because of the CMS we made. They couldn’t and shouldn’t give a damn.”

To quote myself, here’s a related idea from my German blog post Journalismus: Themenzentriertes Arbeiten, vernetzte Beiträge und hilfreiche Software:

“Local media needn’t cover everything themselves, but should be able to act as a platform for any topic. If readers start to write about a new topic of interest on their own blogs or social media accounts, local media can set up a central Web page for that topic, to aggregate and curate what their readers have written. They don’t even have to administer that page themselves, readers might volunteer for doing that. (An example: Combine official traffic information and tweets mentioning traffic jams in a way that’s useful to commuters.)”