If it weren't for refrigerators ...

... community news would have died years ago. As it is, we're in need of a good digital refrigerator.

Amy Gahran writing on Poynter's site:

(Lisa Williams, a longtime citizen journalist and founder of Placeblogger) posited in a conversation yesterday, and I think she has a point, that in fact perhaps most people really consider community news and civic information to be a nice-to-have, rather than an absolute necessity. There's a dissonance between people's values as they envision or proclaim them, and as they live them.

The disconnect between what people and say and do ... continued.

My take: "Community news" in terms of geography is a print construct that has proven it fails to translate to digital media. The Internet allows people to form their own communities of interest unbounded by geography.

"Community news" sucks with photos of six-year-olds that I don't know holding trophies, but Facebook rocks because it delivers news about "my community." The same could be said of Twitter. They engage readers or users, if you prefer, in a way that community news sites don't -- at least for me.

(I do, however, like photos of my own children holding trophies and run those big so I can paste them on my refrigerator.)