Packt, a publishing company that specializes in books about computer programming, has begun selling electronic versions of its books that you can download before the writing is even finished. They call the program RAW -- for "Read As we Write." You get to download chapters as they are posted, even before the final publication edits.

The benefit is easy to see: It cuts out the painfully long cycle of manufacturing and distribution that can make computer books out of date before they're shipped. The cost, of course, is that the consumer has to deal with a potentially higher error rate. Packt is setting up Google Groups for each RAW book and encouraging readers to post corrections, which may make it into the final printed edition.

This isn't an isolated case; it's part of a broader pattern of "ship, then fix" that's touching everything from laptop computers to mainstream journalism. We blog, we make mistakes, we fix mistakes, and eventually we maybe print something that's more accurate and more thoroughly researched than it otherwise would have been. Such a process often is very uncomfortable for those raised in the closed-society model of journalism.

I'm reminded that everything old is new again. Long before the Web and open Internet access revolutionized the online world, there was a closed online system called GEnie. One of GEnie's features was a very active discussion group for writers and wannabee novelists. One writer attracted a lot of attention by posting chapters of his novels as he wrote them, asking for feedback and discussion. His name was Tom Clancy. You may have heard of him.

This week I'm in Jacksonville, Fla., where a team (right) is hard at work rebuilding Jacksonville.com on our new Drupal-based site management system. There are others up in Augusta and other locations, working as part of a larger virtual team, but even with instant messaging and regular conference calls there's no substitute for shoving a bunch of folks into one room with a sack full of junk food and not letting them out.

The Florida Times-Union's site will be the first on the new platform, followed by the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Conway (Ark.) Log Cabin Democrat. Launch has been pushed back a couple of weeks because of the elections -- we have high confidence in the hardware and software, but people will be stressed out enough without the added complexity of new tools on Nov. 4.

We're relying heavily on some Drupal contributed modules, especially Views (which lets you query the database and create various types of lists without writing SQL), the Content Construction Kit (arbitrarily structured special content types), FeedAPI (RSS and Atom acquisition), and Panels (arbitrary custom page layouts).

The result should be a system that lets reporters report, writers write, and editors edit without having to know anything about HTML, scripting, FTP and other online technobabble. Nevertheless, there are going to be some interesting training challenges as we move from a world in which the Web was the exclusive concern of a small team of specialists, to a world in which every member of the news organization can directly play an appropriate role in Web operations.

Forbes reports that the New York Times is planning to fold the IHT.com website into the Times' main website, perhaps the first step in bringing to an end a venerable brand in the community of American expatriates in Europe.

It seems inevitable. The International Herald Tribune, originally the European edition of the New York Herald, once met a great need. For the expat American in Paris, it was like a drink of cool water to a traveler wandering in the desert.

It made content from its longtime partner owners, the Times and the Washington Post, available every morning on racks at news agents and tobacco shops throughout Europe. It wasn't that long ago that traveling singer-songwriter John Prine, seeking the familiar comfort of something truly American, could pick up a copy of the IHT and be inspired to write an ode to Dear Abby.

But the Web has changed all that, bringing every major newspaper in the world into a one-click radius in a highly networked global society.

There has apparently not been a decision to kill the brand in print, but I would not at all be surprised to someday see the International Herald Tribune quietly replaced by the New York Times in those European newsstand racks.

It's a shame, because I think the Times and its previous partner, the Washington Post, failed to capitalize on the brand when there was an opportunity to do so.

The IHT is not just a newspaper. Holding an IHT in your hand as you sip coffee at a Paris sidewalk cafe, in a Prague square, or at a Berlin walk-up früstück bar is a badge of identity, part of being a citizen of the world.

IHT could have leveraged that into an online community for American expatriates, but that would have required recasting IHT's own image of itself beyond the simple concept of "online newspaper." And we know how hard it is to make such a leap.

Paul Fahri is right in so many details as he recounts how he deck is stacked against America's newspapers, yet so wrong in concluding that journalism doesn't share the blame. Journalism should share the blame, and journalists are not powerless.

He seems to have a notion that there is some sort of objective standard of quality that has been maintained during the long and painful descent of newspapers from the position they once held at the center of American life.

There is no such standard. Quality of journalism has much to do with relevancy and relationships, and those are moving targets.

The right question is whether newspapers are practicing journalism that's relevant to the lives and the needs of the community. And there lies the problem. The needs of the community have changed. Newspaper journalism, by and large, has not.

I could go off on a rant about how newsroom mossbacks have actively interfered with innovation, especially online innovation, over the last 15 years. There's no point; that's water under the bridge, and even the few remaining curmudgeons recognize that the world has changed (however little they want to deal with it).

The deck is stacked against the newspaper, but newsrooms are not powerless victims in the grip of some irreversible cosmic force. There is still high demand for effective local mass advertising solutions. Newspapers can be that solution -- in fact, they could be the last mass medium standing.

But you can't do it with a 20 percent market penetration, and that's what you'll have if you continue producing a 1968 newspaper in 2008.

Interactive engagement with the community transforms journalistic behaviors.

Transforming journalistic behaviors can lead to vigorous growth in readership.

I've been talking about this for years, using the Bluffton Today readership story as an example. But here's a more recent, and smaller, example.

The Florida Times-Union is a "big old" conventional full-service daily newspaper published in Jacksonville. Like most big dailies, its brand is powerful -- and tarnished in some quarters. To the blogging community, it's just another MSM sellout.

To the twentysomethings, it's just another irrelevancy produced by old people, for old people. I won't even get into the opinions held about the paper by crackpots and political kooks, of which there are plenty in Florida, just as there are everywhere. It's in pretty much the same boat as every other large daily newspaper in the United States.

But something is going on.

A couple of weeks ago, police raided a popular local dance spot and shut it down. That's not a story that most old-people newspapers would regard as important, but Jonathan Bennett, who with Joe Black runs the newspaper's Jaxdotcom Twitter channel, picked up on a Twitter reference to the raid. He "retweeted" it.

A couple of followers immediately responded that they'd been in the raid. This led to some information-gathering and a "just in" story, which of course was "tweeted." A local blogger provided a photo. Before long the raid story had become the #1 most-read story of the day for Jacksonville.com, with hundreds of comments and a real buzz sweeping through the local networked community of twentysomethings.

An old-people newspaper, on top of young-people news. Imagine that.

Rich Ray, director of digital media at the T-U, said "This non-traditional approach has garnered high praise (while strengthening bonds of trust and respect) from prominent local bloggers who usually view T-U efforts with a very cynical eye."

What should you take away from this story? Try this: There are some problems you can't solve. There are some that you can solve.

Newspapers can't survive if journalists throw up their hands and blame everything on mysterious forces. Get back to work and use the tools that are sitting in front of you to connect with the community. Have a conversation. Learn from it. Discover what people care about. And accept that journalism needs to adapt to new social realities.

Newspapers, which replaced the town crier with what became to be known as print journalism, are slowly awakening to a second function that's ideally performed on the Web: the town square. But there's a third role that's being overlooked, and that's the role of community memory.

I've begun using that term lately in discussions of how we need to expand our journalistic processes. We need to move away from exclusive reliance on episodic storytelling and toward the creation of "living resources" that are updated whenever they need to be. I touched on this concept briefly in earlier posts about obituaries, which in many cases ought to be life stories of the living.

Neither the production nor the consumption of news today is necessarily tied to a schedule. We're no longer limited by the daily print cycle or the six o'clock newscast. Most journalists see that as a "publish it now" opportunity, but miss the "maintain it forever" implications.

Jeff Jarvis takes on this topic today in a declaration that "the building block of journalism is no longer the article." He continues: "I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative
process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background."

As it happens, we're building this capability into the site management system we're stitching together for the various Morris newspapers, beginning with Jacksonville.com, which we expect to relaunch in November. It's a concept we hope to see used in both editorially crafted and community-driven contexts, the latter taking shape along the lines of a local Wikipedia.

As in all cases, though, it's not a matter of technology but one of human behavior. Will old-dog journalists learn new tricks? Will community members contribute to a locally focused "memory?"

Community memory, by the way, was the name of the world's first public computerized bulletin board system, which was operated 1972-74 by a group of hippie ur-geeks in Berkeley, Calif. I love the name.