Citizens & journalists in Raleigh

Dan Barkin, the News & Observer DME who was recently named "participation editor," has a valuable post on the N&O's new triangle.com "community sharing" site. It's a great introduction to what they're trying to accomplish – and an illumination of them taking a fast ride on the learning curve as they explore new territory.

Here's a taste:

What we have tried to create is a community space. A town square on the web. A new newsroom. A thing that is more yours than ours.

The address of this page is share.triangle.com, and it is part of a larger community site called Triangle.com, a sister to Newsobserver.com, that is still a work in progress. Our part of the sharing, one part, is to put it up on the web, try to figure out the best we can how it should look, what kind of tools it should have, that sort of thing.

And we’re still figuring out, with your help, what makes these kind of sites work. A couple of days ago, I had lunch in Chapel Hill with a very smart man, Phil Meyer, a journalism professor at UNC. One of his sayings is “invest a little, learn a lot.” And that’s one of our objectives here, to learn a lot.