OPEN

After being impressed this morning by Press Gazette‘s very community-focused, network-friendly website I’ve been even more impressed by the AOL /discuss Journalism forum which Linda referred to in the comments section of a post earlier.

Launched in June, the site works a bit like Comment is Free it has a roster of authors – including Piers Morgan, Guido Fawkes and Kevin Marsh – and is open for comments from anyone. Recent articles / debates include Daily Sport’s publishing graphic images of the violence in Lebanon, the rights and wrong of the entrapment artist / investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood and an amazing article about the dangers of blogging about rumours as a non-professional journalist by an emergency medical technician called Tom Reynolds

There really is a reason for everyone to love this forum. Reasons for comms, media, hacks, bloggers and marketers (as well as those who fall between these categories) to love it include:

1. If you’re a journo, I expect you’re already reading / subscribed to it.
2. Corp comms people: if you’re interested in media relations, like the BBC Editors Blog this is professional journalism laid-bare, being honest and debating its own important issues in public.
3. If you’re in publishing: here’s what happens when you let your community debate things that are important to it. Interesting, challenging dialogue between the real experts about the subjects you’re writing about: the practitioners. You get a site that is living and breathing and invested in by your readers with their own precious time, tirades and typos… It’s what the people formerly known as the audience want you to do for them.
4. And if you’re a marketer – this is a great case study for how your brand can behave in a network in a positive way: by making itself useful. In this case by facilitating, acting as a host, a provider of space for debate.

For all the current uncertainty around AOL in the UK at the moment, its marketing around the /discuss theme has been masterful.

And, I note, this particular project one of Ben Carter’s. Brilliant work, Ben – hope you can share a case study with us all soon – be really interested to hear how it’s going.

Tags: publishing, media, social_media, debate, news, journalism, AOL, marketing, networks