The Guardian gives away a nice Jack Wolfskin backpack each week for the best contribution to the reader-generated GuardianWitness Been There travel site. For example, the recent call for 100-word entries on this outdoor walking theme:

• The UK’s countryside is beautiful for a walk or hike any time of the year, but in autumn, with its dazzling colours and delicate sharpness in the air, there are some trails that really prevail. Where’s your favourite hike to embrace the changing seasons?

The principle could hardly be any simpler: Guardian readers know their countryside and can create useful content. All a paper has to do is encourage readers to share in the writing and make those new writers look good with proper design, photography, and editing (as needed). Here is a tempting reader contribution to an earlier call for posts on microbreweries:

• Beerwolf Books, Falmouth, Cornwall

• Approaching Beerwolf feels like you've stumbled on a secret: it's up an easy-to-miss alleyway between chain stores, in a beautiful 18th-century building on Bells Court. Through the door, there's a staircase and a view of shelves of books. So it is a bookshop. Then there's the smell of beer and the sound of chatter. So it is a pub. There are several cask ales and an interesting range of bottled beer, not only from Cornish breweries. beerwolfbooks.com

I'd stop by that establishment, and I'd keep reading a local paper that got readers involved that way.