A few years ago, an assignment took me into factories. They weren't what I expected. In today's wired work environment, people are not meek recipients of top-down orders. The boss asks for and gets feedback. I learned that factory workers don't run machines anymore.
Workers run computers and computers run the machines.
But the newspaper is the place where a community can have a conversation with itself, where ideas may be debated and dissenting voices heard, where a civic consensus may emerge. But that's best done when the walls of fortress journalism are torn down and the public is invited in. It seems to me that one way is for news organizations to reach out and invite people in. They honor those who write the best letters to the editor at an annual banquet. They convene groups of readers whenever there is a major breaking local issue and the report the deliberations of these citizen groups when they illuminate the issue.