MPs debated the future of national and local newspapers in Westminster Hall, in the Commons, this week.

A common theme among many of the contributors was the damaging role they felt subsidised council newspapers play in undermining privately-owned newspapers which need to make a profit. Birmingham City Council suspended publication of its own paper, Forward, in June this year.

The minister responding to the debate was culture minster Sion Simon, Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington.

I won't publish his comments here as he was responding to speeches made by other MPs, and his remarks don't make sense without reading the original speeches. However, you can see the whole thing for yourself at Hansard.

The other West Midlands MP to take part in the debate was Lorely Burt, MP for Solihull and a Lib Dem spokeswoman on business issues. I don't think I'll comment on what she said. Here is her speech:

"The news has been defined as something that people do not want us to see. All who have spoken in the debate have been at the difficult end of that. The Birmingham Post required all local MPs to pre-publish their expenses. One or two MPs were rather reticent to do so, but we nevertheless complied. That shows the power of the local press. Local papers, such as the Solihull News and the Solihull Times, publish what our MPs in my area have been up to, but many are not totally comfortable with that.

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I've written before about my hope that newspapers will make more effort to build communities on their websites.

In a nutshell, I think local and regional papers should introduce an element of social networking on their websites, to complement (not replace) existing social networks that people may be part of. In other words, the local newspaper should the community website for Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle and so on.

Northcliffe are now doing pretty much what I suggested (I'm not claiming they got the idea from me).

I think their "Local People" sites are worth a look. They key point is that they allow readers to create an identity which goes beyond just having their name next to a comment. This is crucial - if you give people tools to express themselves, present a face to the world and connect with others, that's half the battle. It almost doesn't matter what those tools are.

The Local People sites allow people to create a profile and connect with others. They can start a group (eg to promote their local Sunday league team, or a charity) and invite others to join.

They can take part in discussions, or begin new ones. They can advertise their business for free (and then get a better advert if they pay)

And as well as commenting on stories, they can write their own.

The big difference with what I suggested is that instead of using these ideas to improve existing news websites (such as Northcliffe's Express & Echo), the business has created an entirely new and separate chain of sites - without the involvement of journalists.

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There's a bit of a debate on Tom Watson's site about reforming the way Parliament is reported, to make it easier for bloggers and others to cover the stories the Lobby has missed.

If you're interested in this, you might consider giving Tom the benefit of your advice, as he's the guy that's going to stick up for you in the Commons (I'm sure he'll thank me).

I don't disagree with his basic thesis - which is, I think, that there's a lot of important stuff going on in British politics that the traditional media, and particularly the national media, never cover.

As he's good enough to say in a comment, local and regional media do pay more attention to some of the issues (eg, NHS provision in Cornwall, or wherever) which he has in mind.

But I'm not sure what sort of reforms he is calling for to correct this.

As I have said before, the Lobby is nothing more than the reporters employed by media organisations to report on politics.

The reason other journalists don't come to Lobby briefings isn't because some arcane rules ban them - it's because they are transport or football correspondents, not political correspondents.

When politicians or special advisers give anonymous briefings to journalists, they are not giving them to the Lobby - just to the particular journalists they choose to talk to.

Inviting bloggers to Lobby briefings, or streaming them on a website, won't have any effect at all on anonymous briefings, which are something separate.

Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent bloggers, or anyone else, from reporting on Parliament right now.

It's streamed live on parliamentlive.tv, which also has an archive of previous debates and select committee meetings, it's available on Hansard and a mashed-up version of Hansard is available on theyworkforyou.com.

Some people are making good use of that - Tom has highlighted Ispystrangers.org. Maybe more bloggers will do so in future. And if it can be made even easier than at the moment, that's a good thing.

But if only a few are reporting on Parliament at the moment, it's not because there's anything stopping them.

I was looking at David Higgerson's blog and saw he had a nifty gadget on it from Tweetminster, the website that keeps tabs on politicians who use the Twitter messaging service.

It provides a stream of "tweets" (Twitter messages) from MPs, candidates, major parties, Parliament and the Government.

This seemed cool, so I stole the idea and added the feed to this page, on the right and down the bottom.