New at IdeaLab: The People Formerly Known as the Audience need a new name

Over at IdeaLab, I’m continuing a conversation I started on Twitter a couple weeks ago that spilled over here as well.

What do you call your readers now that they’re participating actively in the creation and curation of unbundled media?

Do you call them a community?

Better yet, what makes an online “community” and how can local news sites foster an environment that makes that more likely?

Here’s a bit from the IdeaLab post, related to something I read recently at GeekDad:

“Because I’m a geek/dad, if not necessarily a full-blown Geekdad yet, it makes perfect sense. These are people like me writing about experiences that are either familiar to me, or talking about ideas that I’m profoundly interested in as a member of the community of people who self-identify as geekdads.

So maybe readers have a common topic of interest (baseball, city government, gardening), but a community is the topic of interest itself (baseball players, city council members and local activists, serious gardeners).”

What do you think?  Head over to IdeaLab and add a comment to let me know.