OPINION: Newspaper websites can learn lessons from social media

Think about the chances of starting afresh, inventing yourself new, when 800 Facebook friends, including that cow from biology class, follow you everywhere you go.
Entirely by chance a private picture can go around the world, be name-tagged, put in contexts, connected with other data. It cannot be deleted and we do not yet know what technologies will be available to search for it and connect it in the future.
Legislation has been slow to find answers to these new challenges, and it looks as if a lot will rely on personal responsibility for a while, for example by resisting the urge to forward something that invades someone's privacy.
That's a responsibility people must be made aware of. And this is, maybe sometimes against their own professional instincts, a task for journalists. To explain and to offer themselves as a trusted institution that respects a person's right to keep a degree of control over what is 'out there' about them. Some news, contents, pictures do not have to be globally available forever. Why make the life of a four-year-old be traceable on Google already?
Now, despite my belief that with being a journalist you are not only part of an economic system, but serve a community, I know that newspapers cannot just not bring stories, as long as they're in accord with the law. There are economic pressures. But you cannot always excuse your actions with systemic necessity. We are not yet slaves to a market machine - we are, I still hope (even after the last year), cleverer than that.
I think there might be an opportunity for regional newspapers in this. After experiencing the effects of the publication of private life, people will start getting protective about their privacy again. After connecting with the world, they will seek hold in local communities again, without discarding the possibilities of global communication.
At the moment, many online services of newspapers add little value for readers of the print version and vice versa - at least none that couldn't be found elsewhere on the internet. As a devoted reader of far too many newspaper websites, but rarely a printed copy, I wished newspapers would think more carefully which content is better placed online and which not. And then explain to me, that certain content won't appear online and why.
This will give me a reason to buy a print version and will tie together the paper's local and regional community of readers, while the online version of the paper will continue to present my beautiful city and region to the world.
It's subsidiarity, baby.

Fritzi Wemheuer recently moved to Liverpool from Germany to begin a career in the PR industry. She is a keen observer of social media and the growth of public relations, and has been immersing herself in the city's PR scene