I’ve had a relatively busy week at work that’s left me too tired to blog most nights and mornings. On Monday I shot video of editorial board meetings with a controversial local school superintendent and his detractors. Yesterday, in the wake of the school superintendent’s firing, I moderated a great, constructive live chat with an education reporter about the district’s future.

In between I’ve been working on an interactive feature that should be posted on Recordnet.com in late October while also fine-tuning the Flash intro to my mom’s Web site and preparing for an early October vacation back east.

Some of the discussion in the journalism industry, meanwhile, has focused on the possibility of a working non-profit model for general circulation news outlets. While a few more non-profit outlets would be great, I’m hoping nobody really believes they’ll replace local newspapers. The funding model might be different, but it doesn’t change the fact that the product is losing popularity with consumers. There’s also not that much non-profit funding to go around, which is why local NPR and public television affiliates tend to have small, poor news departments.

But I’m sure discussion about the non-profit model won’t end soon, so there will be plenty of time for blogging on the subject.

What I’m more interested in today is the very young, very small but energetic movement to improve how information is spread locally through social networks. The idea started at Brewery33.com and Podcast Stockton, and the guys at Reclaiming the Title have picked it up while also citing some of the challenges it faces.

It’s led to #stir, short for share the information revolution, a Twitter hashtag designed to make it easier for users to find important local information on the site.

Again, as they’ve said on RTT, #stir has its problems. There’s still a fair amount of debate over the power and importance of Twitter. (My first draft of this blog post was in response to previous link and opened with the sentence “There are three types of people who Twitter: nerds, celebrities and revolutionaries.” But I’m not going to re-state what’s already been posted on RTT.)

Still, it’s the potential of ideas like #stir that get me out of bed in the morning. A community that can agree upon how information should be spread – whether it be through a hashtag, Facebook page or other element – will obviously improve communication in that community.

It’s already happened with the independent music community, which continues to rely on MySpace as its primary source for information. In the past indie music fans had to hunt down fliers or posters or rely on friends for information about the next big thing. Today, they simply log on to MySpace and see what’s being discussed and what’s going on. Concerts advertised solely on MySpace have drawn hundreds of fans to a small- to medium-size venues, proving its value as a marketing tool for that community.

MySpace, hashtags and the like also provide an opportunity for newspapers to reach and communicate with different audiences. I talked about the idea this morning with Steve Buttry, one of the biggest proponents of innovation in journalism. (Sidebar: how weird is it that a phone discussion with the C3 Coach at Gazette Communications was a total fanboy moment for me?) He noted that some newspapers have successfully used a common, issue-based hashtag to spread information to the Twitter audience. The Oklahoman’s news site, NewsOK, created a hashtag in its market that allowed Twitter users to share their stories about a severe storm. And the #iagaymarriage tag helped the Des Moines Register reach audiences for discussion on that issue.

Buttry also said hashtags can help newspapers tell better stories through readers like those who shared their storm experiences in Oklahoma.

Popularizing a common hashtag can begin with using it on Tweets about a important local issues like gay marriage in Iowa, Buttry noted. It’s not for me to determine which issue would be good for #stir, but I look forward to seeing what happens with it.

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