Full article available: http://drupal.org/node/718804

The Augusta Chronicle, the flagship newspaper of Morris Publishing Group, recently relaunched its website on the outstanding Drupal framework.

From time to time there comes a revolution of sorts, making companies come to the crossroads of change or business as usual. For the banking industry, it was a stock market crash after the housing bubble burst. The change was rapid for the banking industry and in many ways too late for them to make the necessary adjustments to survive.

To stay on the cutting edge with newspaper web design, our team has been working hard to come up with programming that can enhance a website's usability as well as give it the edge online competing with other newspapers.

There's an interesting debate going on among some newspaper industry watchers, concerning how newspapers should approach the question of "community." Paul Gillin has written that the concept of newspapers building communities is a fallacy and that newspapers shouldn't even try. He notes that the idea of a community around newspaper content usually just doesn't make much sense, and newspapers are simply hopping on the buzzword bandwagon in yelling "community" without any real sense of how to build one. As he notes, a newspaper's strength isn't in building community, but in creating content.

Steve Yelvington blasts back that Gillin is quite mistaken and that community is the most important thing that newspapers should be focusing on: "Failure to build community is one of the many reasons so many newspapers are in so much trouble right now."

Here's a hot topic that was brought to me today by an editor in Indiana, who asked why should his newspaper offer an RSS feed (or news feed), when it could then be used by other newspapers?

For those unfamiliar with RSS feeds, it is a syndication feed on some websites that allows the content of the site to be read in news readers or other websites. This site uses such a news feed in both ways: The content of the site can be read in a news reader and we have content from other sites fed into this site in the middle navigation bar to your right.

RSS feeds serve a very specific purpose and are used to a great extent by many people who use the web. In no way does it make it easier for people to steal content from your site. In most cases, someone who uses an RSS feed on their site can actually help the site who supplies the information with traffic and ad revenue.

If someone were to just take your content without giving credit or linking to your site, they can do it very easily by copying and pasting.

And I believe the RSS feeds can actually help newspapers in both readership and advertising revenue.