Interesting think piece from Matt McAlister on media as a platform. A theme we’ve touched on before.

It’s not about stopping bad behavior or even embracing good behavior. It’s about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for an entire ecosystem. If you do it right, you will watch network effects take hold naturally. And then everyone wins.

Like Matt, my thinking along these lines goes back a long way, but I have yet to perfect the language for designing what I see. I remember one of the first things I read (probably in 1995) about the value of links, and how linking in and linking out “raises all boats.” Time and time again, I think we’ve seen how that works in a networked world.

I like what Matt says about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for the entire ecosystem.

And while we work toward implementing something like that for the newspaper.com, I’m not sure the vision has been perfected yet — not for the newspaper.com, because there is some intrinsic value of a newspaper.com brand, resources and position in the community that can probably be leveraged in unique ways.

For me, in my present job, there is so much to do just to establish a baseline. Building and nourishing an entire ecosystem is a longer-term project.