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(Note: you must be registered to vote. If you’re not sure about the terms, you may want to read the post before voting.)

The media landscape has changed dramatically over the last decade, with ownership concentrating in fewer corporate hands, and with declining newspaper circulation and ad revenue. Eric Alterman eulogizes the late, great big city daily ^[2] in a recent New Yorker.

Our home-town daily struggles to maintain relevance with a proxy Web site, and tragi-comedically cautious style which has seen them sit on important stories (see Packwood and Goldschmidt) to protect their powerful friends, even as they pursue Pulitzers for fluffy human interest reporting.

Meanwhile, blogs have sprung up like weeds in the fertile soil once covered by paid journalists, with citizen journalists pouring forth millions of column inches daily, completely free of the stodgy old constraints of artificial objectivity.

The internet and cheap home computers have made the printing press ubiquitous and available to the masses. I have one in my office, and any joe with an e-mail address can borrow time for free on any number of commercial blog platforms.

With these printing presses, you can write any damn thing you please, ranging from what you had for breakfast, to an exposé of a high-ranking government official.

At one end of this spectrum is what I consider social networking. Sites like MySpace, Facebook and LiveJournal are full of OMG! and LOL!

At the other end is what I call public journalism, as practiced on large and small scales on many sites around the world. Writers cover issues that are important to them, with a clear point of view evident in their work. Credibility is earned through diligence and reflected in networks of interlinked blogs.

Metblogs, in my view, has walked the fuzzy line between the two, but has tended more toward social networking. My own posts here ^[3] have often been fluffy (though I think I’ve occasionally engaged in some serious citizen journalism and commentary).

To be clear, nobody needs Metblogs to be one thing or another. My personal printing press allows me to regularly engage in public journalism on school equity issues ^[4] and local politics (and hockey) ^[5]. I could do that kind of work here, too.

For example, there are contested city, county and Metro elections on the ballot next month, not to mention primaries for statewide offices and the US Senate, but there has been nary a peep about these races on Metblogs. I go to debates and talk to candidates. I could write about this stuff here. Does anybody care?

Personally, I see great potential for Metblogs to be a collaborative source of local (or hyper-local) news, policy analysis and commentary. If I owned it, that’s the direction I would steer it. But I don’t own it; I just write here.

What do you think? Social networking or public journalism? I’ll use the community’s response as a guide to my future here.