With TIME magazine’s recent pronouncement that we are all the person of the year because we participate in this alter-world of media, I’m reminded of something I hear from folks in the online journalism world far too often.

It goes something like: “Why didn’t we think of that?”

When MySpace became so popular, I heard more than one person regret that newspapers weren’t the purveyor of social networking sites. And then I saw others kicking themselves when YouTube exploded.

All of us need to take a breath and recognize that newspapers are not the social network. Never have been. Newspapers benefit from the network, but we are not the network.

The way it has always worked, and works best, is when newspapers write something so provocative or important that readers tell their friends. And those friends tell someone else. And so on. The newspaper lights up the social network by inserting valuable news.

The only possible exception to this model is classified advertising. Here, newspapers serve as the connector of a community invited (for a fee) to talk directly with each other. It is a network.

Still, at our core, newspapers are about news. Let’s focus on ways to make it easier for people to spread the word about the news. Social bookmarking tools are an example of that. Another example: The Washington Post’s tool from Technorati that tells folks where a story is being blogged about.

E-mail a friend options are the most basic examples of how online newspapers make it easier for social networks to light up.

The next step for newspapers isn’t becoming MySpace or YouTube, it’s creating a way to integrate newspapers with those services.