Some might say that much of the magic that happens when creating news content happens in editorial meetings. Reporters, editors and other staffers toss around ideas for stories, features and more.

Traditionally, that brainstorming process has been closed off to readers and users of news content. However, as journalism professor Jay Rosen pointed out in a recent presentation, the communications power structure has shifted and people have become a bigger part of the process. They are not just consumers, but users and creators. With a social bookmarking tool, like Diigo or Delicious, newsroom staff can help add context to stories and bring readers into the news gathering and planning process.

This post will be the first in a regular Friday series on how to use different social media tools and integrate them into the newsroom. Today, I’ll focus on Diigo, a social bookmarking site that I recently started using. The possibilities for Diigo are many, and I won't be covering all of them, so if you have more, add them to the comments.

How does Diigo work?

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Diigo functions like Delicious except with a few twists. The video above will explain this quicker than I can. Give it a watch before you read on. In short, Diigo enables you to not only bookmark websites and URLs, but also annotate them, save them as full HTML pages (in case they ever go away) and form groups centered around topics.

How can journalists use it?

1. Bookmark stories. These can either be stories your news org produces that center around a specific topic area or stories that other news orgs and people produce that add more context to your coverage.
2. Save and archive primary documents. This way, readers and website users can always access Web pages or other information that may be yanked down for various reasons.
3. Create sticky notes for your stories to spark further conversation. The interactive sticky note feature of Diigo could be a nice way to highlight the holes in a story. Of course, audience members would need to have a Diigo account to see these public sticky notes. Sticky notes can also be used among newsroom staff, so your audience sees a live conversation about the story involving the staff that produced it.
4. Create a knowledge repository around topics and news events. Diigo makes it easy to collaborate as a group. What if you used this tool to collaborate among reporters and editors, or set up a special group for your most engaged readers and users? The possibilities for more context-driven news exist, thanks to bringing the knowledge of many together.

These are just for starters. What other ways can journalists use Diigo and other social bookmarking tools?