Rich Gordon's blog item for the Readership Institute discusses a Medill School of Journalism project conducted in partnership with Yahoo and a Chicago filmmaker group. It quotes liberally from Robert Putnam, who was an inspiration for much of what we've done at BlufftonToday.com, and includes a nod to Drupal:
The students ended up being disappointed by the Yahoo! tools. They found that it was impossible for a group such as Chicago Filmmakers ... to integrate these tools so members could interact in all the ways they might want to. (For instance, separate logins are required for many of the Yahoo! services.) Instead, the students used open-source community tools (Drupal and its modules) to build an entirely new Web site for the organization.
There's also a link to download the full report in PDF form.
We have been working with Medill and the Holland Sentinel, a Morris newspaper, on a NewspaperNext-inspired project that includes a Drupal-based Web component.
Medill's background with Drupal goes back to the GoSkokie.com project in 2004, which aimed to create a local online community as a Web startup.