I’ve actually come across your blog because I’m writing a piece of research around how organisations are handling this issue in their communication with staff/media/public – but especially their internal communication with employees. So far the answer, as you might expect, is “not very dynamically”. At one end of the scale, the lumbering corporation sticks to its stolid corporate prose for the most part, engaging no audience. Or the hip n happening dot.commers go the civic journalism route and end up with something unreadable and that pisses the top brass off because it just looks like time-wasting from their employees.

The problem is that, most of the time, most organisations are trying to employ an unhappy hybrid of the two – effectively trying to send out internal announcements on the quarterly results but in a “bloggy” way that will “play with the kids”. As with your complaints here, it ends up being just transparently try-hard, like a dad dancing at a wedding… and pleases no-one.

So rest assured it doesn’t just happen in the national/local press. It happens in the way these technologies are adapted by big and small companies, advertisers, marketers, PR people, etc in all their efforts at content creation too. Anything “old school” is seen as behind the times – but often a pleasant, quaint and improving format. Anything user-generated is seen as “cool” and “the future”… but treated as a bit of a loose cannon (with looser views on structure and syntax).

These corporates and consultants would be less lucid than you and would refer to it as an “as yet underappreciated paradigm shift in the nature of interactive communication”, but the point is much the same – we’re all trying to work out what’s the right way to decant the good stuff from a suddenly overflowing pot of opinion. We’ll get there. Patience patience.

I think the burning question is not – what do readers want from their news? It is something more like – given that readers have a resistance to paying for news, how can it be funded?