Meta Ideas

Suppose you're the editor of a smallish newspaper, looking for fresh ideas not generated by your newsroom. Try Metafilter While trying not to name names it's seems rather clear that a few reporters, from a few papers (cough, a certain major newspaper located on West 43rd Street) are reading the site and then writing about topics that pop up there.

And darn, Nicole Stockdale beat me to the posting of this amusing link where you can produce a snippet of a newspaper using your own text, also seen first (by me, anyway) on Metafilter. It's similar to the church sign generator site, but the first site lists or links to a lot of other fun tools. Personally, all mine went to praising the kid and her soccer team...

Seriously, Metafilter is a great example of the value of blogs to journalists. So many sites allow ordinary people to raise some great topics and alert us to things we'd otherwise not know about. And, rather than waste our time tearing the blogs down, we ought to be using the information these sites develop. Doesn't mean all of it; doesn't mean we shouldn't credit them (!). Above all, it doesn't mean people should or will stop reading newspapers. It's just common sense to take information and do something with it: re-report, verify, debunk, develop.