We think and talk a lot here about the word "engagement" (see how big it is on our tag cloud?): How can social entrepreneurs use information to better engage people in and with their world? How does information drive action?

There was a terrific discussion around this question this week on Dowire's news-online group — focused not just on the questions above, but on the relationship between engagement and value, both economic and social. It's excerpted below, and well worth reading to the end. Your thoughts?

"Online news hasn't crossed over to citizens moving from talk to solving problems. Is there any good reason that news organizations shouldn't try to foster that?"

Paul Swider: "There's no good reason, except that news media types are so desperately wedded to the imaginary goal of objectivity that they are afraid of advocacy. Online organizations already solve problems, or at least take action (only time will tell if the problem is solved). News organizations could and should be at the forefront of this because it brings context to the user experience, which drives audience which is what will get people to want to pay, in whatever fashion. The first news org to help people bring real, actionable meaning to the deluge of information in their lives will have hit on a key business success. But to do that, the org will have to let go of "two sides" and faux objectivity. HuffPost got this last part and may be on the way to the next."

Steve Outing: "Perhaps someday we'll figure out how to harness the crowd to solve problems; one possibility is to get people to pay to participate. InDenverTimes.com is a start-up founded by 35 former Rocky Mountain News journalists, backed by 3 money men with no publishing experience. Their initial model is to set up premium subscriptions of $4.99 a month for complete access to the site's content, with "news stories" free but other stuff (columns, etc. TBD) only accessible to paid subscribers.

"One thing you get with a $4.99/month subscription is the ability to be part of the community and interact with the journalists (and of course other readers) in not only comment threads but regularly scheduled chat sessions with journalists and newsmakers. The idea is, yes, to make money to support InDenverTimes.com. But it also serves the purpose of limiting the size of the pool of commenters and those asking questions of staff journalists, and (in theory) reduces the amount of reader interaction that the staff journalists need to do to a manageable level. In theory you'll get the most engaged and interested people paying, and the riff-raff/spammers/scammers/idiots are mostly locked out.

"I don't endorse InDenverTimes' approach, though with some modifications it *might* work in creating online forums that are a bit more like what Orson Scott Card envisioned decades ago in Ender's Game, where people come together to actually solve problems and the agitators and vandals are kept at bay and the "right" people are involved in the right online discussions.

Jane Ellen Stevens: "That's the approach we're taking with a regional health social/news/information network we're developing during my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. On a local or regional level, many health issues are community-related as well as individual problems. The students have chosen a topic within health, mapped the community, and found out what its goals are. For example, Boone County has a dental health crisis: there's a three-year wait to see a dentist in a free clinic. There aren't enough dentists. And half of the dentists in the state are over the age of 55.

"People will be invited to join the topic to participate in figuring out how to quantify or achieve personal goals (better dental hygiene) and community goals (more dentists, more prevention programs in schools, etc.). Journalists keep the community on track by pointing out when those goals have or have not been met, and what other communities are doing that might be of use. They do so by collaborative, serial beatblogging, and engaging the community in the  discussion. And, we're aiming for this to be ad-supported by businesses that sell products and services to this particular community."

Brian Shields: "It seems to me that news organizations could still maintain at least a sense of balance by writing a non-advocacy story on a controversial issue and then creating  social networking spaces where readers/viewers on any side can get involved, can debate the subject reasonably, and then come together as groups to take action on one side or the other.   The subsequent actions of the readers/viewers then become fodder for further coverage by the news organization."

Robert Niles: "Traditional print journalism, when it abandoned its partisan roots, became more focused on indifferent reporting than affecting change within its communities. Sure, an occasional project moved the paper toward action, but usually when the action could be framed in a non-partisan manner. If there's been a dominate narrative to American journalism over the past half century, it's been that partisanship is a bad thing.

"It isn't. Partisanship is wonderful. It is the means by which people identify their differences and collectively decide, in a peaceful manner, in whom to entrust the ability to make decisions on behalf of the community. Dig into the diaries on DailyKos and you will find an immense amount of local reporting. (Yes, you'll also find a lot of poorly written junk, too.) But instead of being written with the idea of simply (merely?) reporting that information, DailyKos diaries are almost always written with the intent of provoking the reader to act on that information. (Even if that act is just to grow more passionate about a cause.)

"Kos is the modern online partisan "press." And it is wildly successful. It probably put Jon Tester and Jim Webb into the U.S. Senate and the site's bringing in millions of dollars of revenue, as well. Kos is hiring full-time writers and commissioning professional polling. (He claims now to be the largest media polling operation in the U.S.)

"A media organization cannot strive to be neutral and to provoke people to act at the same time. Neutrality doesn't motivate people."