This morning, looking at what the Santa Cruz Sentinel is doing on FriendFeed, it occurred to me that I might be looking at the newspaper of the future, here today.

FriendFeed gives the Sentinel all of the functionality a Web 2.0 enabled newsroom needs. The paper (how’s that for a term describing an online news outlet?) can quickly post a steady stream of news items and photos. Readers can just as easily comment on an item, share it, or give it a StumbleUpon-style “Like” aka, a thumbs-up.

There are icons allowing readers to easily sign up for any of several RSS feeds the paper offers. The purpose of each of these is not readily apparent, but by hovering over any one of them you can see the URL, which tells you what the feed is for.

On FriendFeed, more than anywhere else it seems, real discussions happen via the comments function. Many newspapers have added commenting to their online versions, but in general this hasn’t generated discussion. It will be interesting to see whether there are any discussions on the Sentinel’s FriendFeed stream.

Another feature of FriendFeed is the ability to search all of a particular user’s stream, so there’s a built-in tool for searching all of the Sentinel’s posts. Right now the Sentinel posts only headlines. Could full text be next?

I’m surprised there are not other services on the Sentinel’s FriendFeed page, but perhaps this is because it’s a new endeavor, or the Sentinel wants to keep things simple. I’d like to see, for example, all of the paper’s photos posted to Flickr, although copyright issues might prevent this.

Congratulations to the Santa Cruz Sentinel for having the vision to try something on the bleeding edge of social media. I really like having this kind of online version of my hometown newspaper (I live not too far from Santa Cruz) and I wish the Sentinel great success with this.

Tags: Santa Cruz Sentinel, Social Media Newsroom, FriendFeed, newspaper of the future