USA Today’s Step Forward

I wrote Newspapers, Roll Up! last week. Today, USA Today, one of Gannett’s (GCI) top holdings, announced a massive overhaul.

From Steve Rubel’s piece: “The notable additions include: reader comments on every story, the ability to create a profile page that can be shared with others, citizen journalist photos, story tagging and digg-like recommendation buttons.”

Don Dodge’s review is here. Mathew Ingram poses the question Can a newspaper be a social network?.

For me, the step is certainly in the right direction.

However, what I want to be able to do is to link my blog to topics that are relevant. Going back to the Pro-Am and Anchor Content-User Content discussion we just had, I would like to automatically attach my blog post to relevant Anchor Content on USA Today, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc. in the same way that Photobucket allows a member to post their photos and videos to ANY social network, MySpace, Facebook, or Xanga.

Similarly, the newspapers need to allow strong Am-Content Generators to easily attach themselves to the Pro-Content on their sites.

I don’t think we are quite there yet.