Growing online community—looking for feedback

My employer, Sound Publishing, has me on a kind of fact finding/info hunting mission as we look for ways to improve our community newsbrands and their Web sites. We want to know what other sites (traditional news sites, blogs, etc.) are doing to build communities around their brands.

I'm hoping some of you won't mind sharing answers to a few of these questions (and please feel free to send me a private message if you aren't comfortable broadcasting anything to the Internet):

• What's working/what's not?
• What is the most frequent request from users?
• What's the most frequent complaint?
• Social media: What are you using and how are you benefiting from it (blogs, comments, photo/video, etc.)?
• If you gain or aggregate content from other sites or print operations, what is the strategy for augmenting that content/what is the presentation?
• How do you (or do you) define what community means on each of your sites/what (generally) are you doing to grow that community?

I know that some of these questions might border on giving away company secrets, but I'd really appreciate it even if you're just able to answer a few.