How do journalists grow social networking in a small(er) town?

Over at his personal blog, Beat Blogger Daniel Victor raises an interesting and ongoing debate. The digital divide right now isn’t 100 percent just between the rich and poor. I imagine in Harrisburg PA people have the money to become digitally entrenched online, but for whatever reason, there hasn’t been saturation of the larger community.

A
lot of the most spirited arguments for social media are often made in
places where there’s already a tech-savvy audience built in.

Yet in a place like Harrisburg, Pa., which is home to the country’s 86th-biggest newspaper and the No. 41 television market, there are a total of nine people on Twitter who have updated their status in the past six days. A local TV station
has taken the initiative to faithfully feed its headlines to Twitter,
and for its efforts has been rewarded with just 20 followers.

And if you search for my coverage area — the town of Hershey, Pa. —
there isn’t a single tweet from the town in the past six days.

The blogging landscape, despite a dedicated few who are doing their best to prop it up, is similarly small.

As a “traditional journalist” who embraces new media as a keystone of journalism’s future, I’ve wrestled with the question: Is it partly my own responsibility to promote new media in the area? And how would I go about doing that?

To an extent I’m doing it, but maybe not enough. I encourage better
blogging practices and better blogger relations in my newsroom, of
course. As part of the beatblogging.org project, I started The Hershey Home to get people who aren’t on Facebook or MySpace to participate in the online discussion.

But individual reporters can only chip away at the problem — it
would take an organization-wide commitment to really make a difference.
It would require serious — not token — linking to local blogs. A
significant effort to use Twitter as a distribution tool. A real
two-way presence on Facebook, instead of using it just to solicit
sources on regional home pages.

If newspaper organizations could somehow boost the use of social
media in their own areas, it would no doubt have long-term benefits for
both the communities and the newspaper organizations themselves.
Outside the big cities, there are a lot of newspapers that ought to be
thinking about how to do that.