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?"

“Is the ‘theory of change’ behind traditional journalism out of date?” Great question. It came from David Bornstein, a journalist and author of How to Change the World, the bible of social entrepreneurship — and it betrayed a distinctive social-entrepreneur view of the world: What's important isn't so much what journalists do, but how their actions operate within larger systems to create social impact.