My entire job description at the Guardian focuses around community building. As they develop their professional / B2B networks, the aim is to build a community of experts that discuss, engage and debate on the major issues within their sector. The desire is to be niche, to be big, but small and to be a part of a wider community, not the head of it.

It all seems so obvious now – everyone can say the writing has been on the wall for ages, community is the way forward. Yet if it was so obvious, why has it taken so long for big media companies to start truly engaging with their readership? Have they lacked the tools, the means by which to engage with their audience?

Or is it more about the need to be seen as the disseminators of truth, justice and knowledge, the alternative to the State, the people’s champion?

Our online tools of engagement are becoming more sophisticated by the day, our ability to curate, discuss and debate content has grown significantly in the past five years – but only now are we really pushing to have a two way conversation. The Guardian now has ‘Community Coordinators’ for News, CIF and Culture, whose sole job is to figure out how best to engage and then put ideas into practise.  It’s a good step forward, but again why did this move have to wait until 2011?

The comments section is not a particularly new invention for the web, but despite the fact that comments are now often seen as an extension of the article and conversation in a way that blogging has been doing for years – it wasn’t always that way.  Sure, comments are not as pretty and as clever as some of the newer social media tools out there – but they are functional and have been around long enough for us to make better use of them. Newspapers are now realising that new details and new stories can come from their readers – who would have thought it?

What I wonder is – why didn’t a newspaper invent Facebook or Twitter?

They are innovative in other ways (sometimes) there has been some great election coverage, expenses coverage via the web that all leverage the output of tools like Twitter and Facecbook – but why couldn’t newspapers see that people were going to want to share content with their friends online like they do in real life?

Again, why wasn’t it a newspaper that invented Wikileaks? (by which I mean a platform to receive sensitive data anonymously) - they are all thinking about it now.

The tools at our disposal for story telling are being added to by the day – who will build the next - Audioboo, Storify, Storyful, Cover it live, Instagram? It doesn’t look like it will be a newspaper; these services are all startups (or at least started life as startups).

The Guardian’s open platform API is an interesting development – but what are other papers doing? Who is building their own platform for engagement and story telling?

I think we are going to start making better use of the tools we have, they are after all quite young in the grandscheme of things. The question is, with Facebook’s dominance and the range of apps in the social space growing everyday – is it too late for newspapers to create their own tools? Will they always be behind the curve and have to use others ideas to build their communities?