Learning to listen

It’s obscenely early, but my husband just left the house to fly out to NYC and I can’t sleep when he’s gone.

I just sent out a tweet from The Gazette’s Twitter account, asking our followers for their ideas about a year-end package I have to put together for online-only. Sure, I’ll be checking out the Most Commented and Most Viewed stories from the Web site, but I wanted to get other thoughts as well.

It made me think about other times I’ve solicited reader input via gazette.com and the need to incorporate more user-generated content into our mainstream product.

Rupert Murdoch spoke last weekend about the hole the media has dug for ourselves: “A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let’s be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves.”

PS, I came across an interesting Twitter post that argues for news organizations to turn off their Twitterfeed. I totally get the spirit of the post, but in practicality I’m not sure I’m on board. Maybe somewhere in the middle is just right.