What news organizations can learn from the Obama campaign (mobile edition)

(This is my latest contribution to the Carnival of Journalism, which is hosted this month by Adam Tinworth. The question before the house this time is what news orgs can learn from the Obama campaign’s use of digital tools in the 2008 campaign. Adam is collecting the responses here.)

As my fellow carnival barkers already know, I think newsrooms can learn a lot from politics, especially at the local level. It’s all about community organizing, and the Obama campaign excelled at using targeted SMS and email messages and social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to build and mobilize a community of supporters nationwide.

I’d expand on this, but I don’t really have anything substantive to add to Jack Lail’s excellent Carnival entry. Instead, I find myself wondering how local news organizations can build on the Obama campaign’s use of mobile services (SMS, Twitter, etc.) to deepen the relationship with local communities.

As Jack rightly suggests, news organizations should be “aggressively growing (their) SMS and email databases” and reaching readers wherever they are. But take that as a given, and then ask the next question: How can news organizations go beyond one-way (or even two-way) content delivery and create platforms for mobile readers to interact with the newsroom and each other in meaningful ways?

Twitter offers a great tool for reporters to build mobile social networks, and quite a few beat bloggers in newsrooms are taking advantage of this. But few if any newsrooms have integrated this content into their websites in substantive ways, so that mobile networks of reporters, independent bloggers, readers, sources and others actually build content together.

Election Night saw some pretty cool exceptions to this, as news organizations (and many others) built data visualization tools to aggregate tweets, photos and more from across the country and display them in creative ways. Why can’t we find equally innovative ways to aggregate and incorporate mobile content into our daily offerings? As more and more people experience the web hour-to-hour through mobile browsers, how we can best leverage that in our markets to build our communities of users?

If you know of any news organization doing this especially well, please share a link in the comments.