Newspapers have always been about communities, particularly local papers. We claim to represent communities and interact with them, and the internet provides new ways of doing that.

But how many newspapers are actually taking advantage of what the internet offers? As a general rule, we offer readers the chance to comment on stories and, um, that's it.

I believe we should be using our websites as places where readers can communicate with us and with each other. This is particularly important for local newspapers. People still care about their local communities. There are plenty of blogs about Birmingham (and no doubt about Liverpool and Newcastle too) - people have ideas and information they want to share. We should be presenting ourselves as the platform to do it.

And there's another reason for creating a community on our websites. People like establishing an identity online, for better or for worse. This is one of the reasons they create blogs. It's one of the reasons you get flame warriors on forums or among people who comment on blogs, and one of the reasons others try to establish a reputation for thoughtful, constructive posts.

It's possible for newspapers to go much further than they do in allowing communities to develop.

I have been playing with JomSocial, which is an application for websites using the Joomla CMS (like this one). It's inspired by sites like Facebook, and allows people to establish an identity online.

Media organisations could encourage journalists to embrace new ways of working by making it easy for them.

For example, articles can frequently benefit from the inclusion of related links. One method of getting those links to readers would be to create a del.icio.us account and direct readers to it.

But a simpler method would be simply to input them with the story itself. This would also allow the business to make better use of them, as the links would be associated both with an individual journalist and with a specific story, as well as being stored on the organisation's own servers. (Links from a journalist's del.icio.us account can be accessed as an RSS feed but I think it would be technically difficult to associate the right links with the right stories this way).

One of the obstacles to journalists doing this is frequently the content management system they use, which may not be designed to accomplish what the media organisation is trying to do.

Media businesses should take the initiative and develop systems designed to make it easy for staff to achieve what they want them to achieve.

I also believe that, while it makes sense to use whatever applications and web services are out there for the taking, it would be a mistake to rely on them. We should deciding what we want to do and then doing it - inspired by what other people are doing, rather than depending on them.

Below is a dummy front end (for authors) of a content management system which I think would be easy to use and accomplish some of what a multimedia news organisation should be trying to accomplish.