Howard Owns has a great post on Eight historical mistakes the newspaper industry made where he goes over newspaper's slow adoption of blogging, online communities, leveraging local blogger's talents, winning the car and real estate market, and becoming better community resources with online calendars.

His comments on the early attempts at forming online communities raises an interesting point about why newspapers may be behind in this game today:

It was a mistake to view content as something we do and audiences read, take it or leave it. Fear kept newsrooms from allowing comments on stories for years — fear of the “graffiti on the bathroom wall” effect. Newspapers tried forums, found they quickly devolved into ghettos of banality, spam and hate, so they shut them down. But forum failure wasn’t the fault of the community or the software. It was the fault of management for its lack of management.

Tech companies created online community solutions relatively early, which allowed for integration of online communities. However, the problem wasn't as much the technology as the management of the technology which led to issues.

This isn't to say that it's an EASY thing to do, but moderation is absolutely key to creating a community that flourishes (online or off). Take a look at most professional blogs and you'll find lively professional discussions in the comments rather than nasty insults, spam, or over the top self-promotion. That's because professionals understand the importance of building a strong community. If you don't, you'll lose the best contributors since they won't put up with the crap.

For those who don't want to invest in proper moderation of things like discussion boards or comments, a compromise solution that works very well is trackbacks. Rather than allowing people to contribute to your site's articles directly, give them credit for the comments they make about your articles on their own blogs. The quality of comments goes up tremendously in this situation since people are more accountable for their writing. Rather than leaving drive-by snarky comments, they're writing for their regular audience and for the audience interested in the story on your news site (or blog).

Two popular bloggers who've taken this approach are Seth Godin and Marc Andreessen. Both writers receive more viewers per article than all but the top newspapers in the country, so comment moderation could be a chore to maintain. By switching to trackbacks, they and their readers can follow their reader's opinions on their reader's own blogs.

Are any newspapers doing this today? Very few, as far as I can tell. One of the first to do so was the Washington Post, who uses Technorati to track who's linking to their articles. For example, this article on YouTube and politics has 36 (now 37) links to it as of this writing. So after reading the article, a reader could click out to 37 independent editorials related to this story.