Steve Yelvington on social networks:

I bring this up because I believe a decline in local community connections is one of the major factors undermining local newspapers in the United States. We’re all spending too much time watching reality television and not enough time dealing with the reality in our own backyards.

One thing Bluffton Today can do to help in this regard, if they’re not already doing it, is bring the online social networks into the real world — host regular events for contributors … go to the theater or dinner together, host symposiums, tour gardens and museums, etc. We tried this with East County Online, but of course we had a much smaller audience to work with back then — still, our events were reasonably well attended.