Jim Cashel, Online Communty Report editor and my long-time business partner, politely asked what my post "911 Blotter: News from a community" had to do with "online community".  (I suspect he was trying to keep me on task.)  My first answer was "not much, but I thought it was funny." 

My second, more considered, reaction is that newspapers have a lot to do with community, online and otherwise, and we often refer to them in our work.  Examples of recent newspaper-related posts include about a NCLR marketing campaign in the funnies, the Albuquerque Journal's success with online interviews, and an online firestorm at the Washington Post.  We observe and learn as newspapers figure out the web -- they need to engage with their communities, generate user-created content, and promote collaboration as a business response to flagging print subscriptions.  We get ideas from them for content, tools, marketing, and more.

Even more important though, Forum One is particularly interested in civic engagement -- online community that produces social value.  Newspapers have long been central to structuring issues and informing readers so that citizens can organize.  Benkler gives some background to the history and importance of papers in the US:

A combination of high literacy and high government tolerance, but also of postal subsidies, led the new United States to have a number and diversity of newspapers unequalled anywhere else, with a higher weekly circulation by 1840 in the 17-million-strong United States than in all of Europe with its population then of 233 million.  By 1830, when Tocqueville visited America, he was confronted with a widespread practice of newspaper reading -- not only in towns, but in far-flung farms as well, newspapers that were a primary organizing mechanism for political association. (p. 187)

So, my rationale for recounting tidbits from the police blotter?  -- it is the press capturing "community" at work.  We will certainly have more about newspapers as we go forward.