What’s more important is how we engage with our users. Drive by users aren’t worth nearly as much to advertisers (or to content producers) as dedicated users. Try this statistic on for good measure:

The average Facebook user spent 5 hours and 14 minutes on the site in July, whereas the average NYTimes.com user spent about 14 minutes.

Which one of those users is more valuable? Obviously, Facebook users are much more dedicated users than NYTimes.com users. Facebook is also getting less drive by users, and drive by users aren’t that valuable. NYTimes.com is one of the better journalism sites out there, and it does fairly well — as far as news sites are concerned — with time spent per user per month.

But news sites — and most Web sites — can learn a lot from leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is continually adding more features to make Facebook sticker: chat, applications (popular games like Farmville are making the site very sticky), the news feed, etc. In fact, time spent on Facebook has soared 699 percent since April 2008.

News organizations need to figure out how to grok what leading social networks are doing, because news Web sites need to get stickier. Clearly, people want to be social. News organizations need to embrace being social and start engaging their users better.  News has to become a conversation.

Getting more users is good, but getting more engagement out of each user is better.

Yes, the Gray Lady now has someone in charge of social media. The idea and title may seem funny to some, but it’s better than what The Wall Street Journal and others have been doing lately. It remains to be seen what Preston will do exactly and if she will really help make the Times more social, but early returns have been promising.

Preston asked users on Twitter today, “How should @nytimes be using Twitter?”

My first suggestion to Preston and the Times would be to be social. This is a given right? Wrong.

Check out the main NY Times Twitter feed. It’s anything but social. It’s a glorified RSS feed, composed of just headlines..

That should be corrected ASAP. The Times has almost 1,000,000 followers on that account, and the paper isn’t doing anything meaningful with it. First order of business for Preston should be to figure out how to make that Twitter feed social and useful.

It’s important to understand a news org and its readers before making suggestions. The Times has a rich history which must be kept in mind, and many of its readers are older. The Times should approach social media differently than a new media startup like TechCrunch.

There are, however, a few suggestions that I think all news orgs could benefit from. Here are a few suggestions from BeatBlogging.Org to the Times and other traditional news orgs:

• Be Social — If you’re going to be on social media, you should be social. This means engaging in two-way communication from the start with all social media accounts. This also means avoiding the urge to make Twitter into a glorified RSS account.
• Transparency — Social media is a great way to humanize reporters and pull the curtain back over a news orgs. Why not Twitter page one meetings and talk about upcoming stories? This would get people excited about upcoming content. A news org like the Times might even be able to charge for this access. People and organizations that are successful with social media are almost always transparent.
• Encourage every employee to experiment with social media — I mean everyone, just not content producers. Even editors who may not use social media for their jobs should be encouraged to play around with social media in their spare time. After all, if an editor is going to be managing other people who use social media, that person should understand social media too. Every employee at news organizations needs to at least understand and appreciate social media.
• Make two-way communication a requirement of content producers — The era of one-way media is over. The era of one-way stories is over. All content producers should be required to engage in two-way communication for their jobs. Content producers should take ownership of the comments after stories, posts, videos, etc. If content producers are required to engage users, it will be much easier for news orgs to build meaningful communities around their products. This could help end comment ghettos.
• Build a bigger network of sources — Social media can help content producers build bigger networks of sources. A bigger network directly translates into more tips, more confidential documents, etc. A bigger network will mean better journalism. Social media is a great way to build a bigger network.
• Crowdsource — Working on a story? Need to find experts or people to comment? Social media is a great way to do that. Need to get people’s experiences? Social media is a great way to do that too. Social media can even be used to get people to help report on a story. Our audience is a great, untapped resource. It’s time for us to harness it.

What would you suggest the Times do with social media and Twitter?

Our first nominee shows that beat reporters don’t need a blog to be social and interact with people. The comments after news stories provide an excellent place for two-way communication and conversations to happen. While the other two nominees spur conversations through beatblogs, the first nominee is bringing two-way communication to his stories.

It’s important to note that there is no one way to go about beatblogging. Beatblogging can happen on a social network like Twitter or on a blog or in the comments after a news story. The keys to beatblogging are two-way communication, accessibility and transparency.

Robert Schoenberger | The Plain Dealer

• First I need to make it clear that this is a newspaper story, not a blog post. Reporters don’t need a blog to engage in two-way communication. The comments section after their stories will do just fine.
• Schoenberger wrote a story about UAW rallies in downtown Cleveland, where workers called on Washington to protect GM and Chrysler plants in the area. The story drew heated comments on both sides, because of the contentious nature of this issue. Many commenters don’t believe the auto industry should be singled out for a bailout, while other industries sink.
• The Plain Dealer recently called on reporters to interact more, and this story shows why interaction can help make a better product. Schoenberger enters the comments and provides additional facts and figures. His presence helped make the comments less volatile, despite this being a topic with passionate people on both sides. Most of all, however, he helped make better journalism by directly responding to claims made by commenters.
• Some commenters brought up how many foreign cars are actually made in the U.S., including some made in Ohio. Schoenberger stepped in to provide some exact figures, “So far this year, Toyota has imported from Japan about 41 percent of the cars it sells here. Honda imported about 19 percent of its cars (Nissan’s been at about the 20 percent import range for years, but it doesn’t break down its numbers as cleanly).”
• To another commenter, Schoenberger explained why resale values of Big 3 automakers are lowers, “For years, Ford, GM and Chrysler produced more vehicles than they could profitably sell, and they dumped the rest on the rental fleet market. So, 6-18 months after the rental companies got those cheap cars, they would dump them on the used market. That created a huge supply of slightly used Big Three cars, and as an economist can tell you, when supply goes up, prices go down. Honda especially has protected its resale prices by keeping production in line with demand. That’s why their resale values are better than Toyota’s. On the Big Three side, the companies slashed fleet sales about two years ago, and their residual values are climbing. But it’s going to take years (and an improvement in car sales) to undo the damage.”
• When you look at this story, and the subsequent comments, you can see how the comments really forwarded the debate along and created a story of its own. The main story itself was about a few small rallies in the Cleveland area. That’s not exactly big news or something that would usually drive a lot of traffic. However, Schoenberger and commenters turned this story into a a larger debate about domestic automakers. That’s really where this story got interesting, and Schoenberger did a big service to PD readers by weighing in with additional facts and figures.

Andrew C. Revkin | The New York Times

• This is an excellent example of using a blog to tie multiple pieces of content together into a package. In one blog post Revkin links to and embeds content from nytimes.com, NYT blogs, YouTube, books.google.com and Times Topic pages. He takes this disparate content and combines it together to make a post about what happens to garbage and how waste effects rich and poor countries and people differently.
• This post itself doesn’t include original reporting, but it does two things: It gets people thinking of these desperate pieces of content — many from the Times itself — as a package of like-minded stories, and it gets a conversation going about the subject. Blogs excel at conversation and seemingly simple posts like this can be great conversations starters — and traffic creators.
• The other thing this post does is bring attention to older content that is still relevant. Not all this content was created the same day, but it was all relevant at the time of the post. Revkin wrote a nice post that tied all the content together and explained why people should care. In doing so, he brought new life to some older NYT content.
• All the content Revkin linked to told a smaller story, but placed together, it tells a much larger and complete story.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• Levinthal gets a nod this week not for a singular action, but for his complete coverage of the recent local elections in Dallas.
• As the election day went on, Levinthal began filling reports on the voter turnout, early vote returns, analysis of how the big vote was going on the Dallas Convention Center hotel proposition, live reports from the Vote No Dallas! party and the results of the big vote. Levinthal also had a post on why he believes Major Tom Leppert was able to win the proposition 1 vote.
• Levithal followed up this terrific election day coverage with a live chat a day later to discuss the election results and what they mean. Levinthal showed how local elections can be covered with new depth and fervor with a good beatblog. Not only did he provide great covering as events broke, but he also provided strong analysis. This combination of news and analysis is hard to beat. This is the kind of coverage that shows how journalism can be better on the Web.