Community is just another way of express­ing shared interest. In the media those shared interests can cross polit­ical and state bound­ar­ies (for example busi­ness news, some sports and pornography).

But where they can’t cross those bound­ar­ies is in polit­ics itself. If you want to get people inter­ested in polit­ics you have to cre­ate a shared interest and an oppor­tun­ity to express that interest.

That has implic­a­tions for journ­al­ism and it’s a theme take up by Simon Jen­kins:

Of all nation­al­isa­tions in Brit­ish his­tory, none has been so cor­ros­ive of the pub­lic good as the nation­al­isa­tion of social responsibility.

I am not starry eyed about the vigour of local demo­cracy abroad. It is messy, bur­eau­cratic and often cor­rupt. But it appears to yield com­munit­ies more able to dis­cip­line them­selves and their young, and more sat­is­fied at the deliv­ery of their pub­lic ser­vices. They do not throw nearly so many people in jail.

Local news­pa­pers are not, as in Bri­tain, filled with impot­ent whinges against cent­ral gov­ern­ment. Local lead­er­ship is con­sidered a duty by cit­izens per­mit­ted to exer­cise it.

Read the com­ments to his piece. If you want to rein­vin­gor­ate local news start cam­paign­ing for more local democracy.

Like any­one in edu­ca­tion, I never pro­cras­tin­ate today over what I can vacil­late about tomor­row. And so it is with my estim­a­tion of Nick Denton, Gawker’s own Mar­quis de Sard.

I admire Denton’s blog empire, and his hard-headed approach to post­ing ($7.50 per 1,000 views), and yet it’s obvi­ous too that his own role in Gawker largely allows him to pur­sue the kind of aim­less, idio­syn­cratic non­sense best left to blogs — well — like this one.

Bob­bie John­son does an excel­lent post tot­ting up Denton’s num­bers and con­cludes:

19 of his posts — that’s nearly 21%, stat fans — didn’t even break the hal­lowed 1,000 pageview threshold… mean­ing they weren’t even worth a measly $7.50 in Gawker’s pay-per-view model.

Admit­tedly, he’s got his own nano-empire to run as well as the site, but Gawker does say “edited by Nick Denton” under the masthead. You’ve got to add some value, right? Looks like his obses­sions with Barry Diller and the Man­hat­tan media scene aren’t per­form­ing well enough.

Denton’s van­ity posts piss in the pond of the com­mer­cial imper­at­ive he preaches. Which really makes Gawker more of what, at busi­ness school, they del­ic­ately refer to as “a life­style option.”

But they also con­firm what every­one in journ­al­ism has always known. Mon­et­ising edit­or­ial con­tent across plat­forms is busi­ness, but sar­donic wise-assing to whoever’s listen­ing? Pure pleasure!