• According to Mathew Ingram, Communities Editor for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, there are things commenters can actually be useful for: fact-checking, new angles to stories, and market research. “The surest way to improve the tone of the debate in forums or comments is to get involved in them.”
• Ten points for each of Brian Manzullo’s five goals for the CM Life website this fall. Other student newspapers should follow his lead and share lessons learned from the experiments. Building “Hot Topic” landing pages is one of the ways you can change up how news is presented, and educate readers with better context.
• Son Hunyh walks through some of the design considerations of relaunching mndaily.com. In my opinion, the category and landing pages are amongst the best in the nation.
• If you on the web today or Sunday, WordCamp Portland is all over Twitter and livestreaming too. There was a great session this morning on speeding up WordPress and Matt Mullenweg showed up at lunch to answer questions from the attendees. WordPress and WordPress MU might become the same software in version 3.0, and BackPress, an abstraction of the WordPress admin, is being used by Automattic in a few projects but has no timeline for release.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

“We want to position ourselves as the center of community while at the same time driving out hateful, hurtful and trollish commenters,” said Jack Lail, Director of News Innovation at the Knoxville News Sentinel, in an email. “It has proven difficult to say the least.”

One of the great things about the Web is that it allows anyone to comment what they think — but perhaps the biggest downfall to that is many of these comments are crude, malicious, self-promotional or plainly irrelevant.

“Many people do not care that we are students and that we are not yet professionals, so many mature readers bash our writers for their opinions or uneducated writing,” wrote Chris Ullyott, Webmaster at The Daily Titan. “ Sometimes it can be pretty discouraging.”

At the Los Angeles Times, too, Blog Editor Tony Pierce reported that one to two users a week on average are banned from ever commenting again. This is especially prevalent in stories about politics, immigration and sports, where readers have a tendency to bicker at each other rather than commenting on the story itself.

“We want to get readers’ opinions up as quickly as possible to engage in discussion,” said Pierce. “It’s very valuable to hear their point of view.”

And while papers strive for diverse opinions, there’s a fine line between running an active-user site and becoming a user-run site.

“There are a lot of places on the Internet for people to express themselves so we don’t feel we are stopping them [by monitoring comments],” Pierce relayed. “ We want to make a quality discussion.”

At The Daily Titan, computers pre-screen comments, weeding out spam and advertisement links.

“We try to create an environment friendly to users of all ages,” said Ullyott. “We do not moderate comments but we do employ a strict blacklist of “no-no words.”

Apart from software, with the July launch of the E.W. Scripps’ Asphalt Design, the Knoxville News Sentinel changed the way they manage users, this time concentrating on abnormal user activity.

“We are reviewing comments of users who just signed up,” said Lail. “And those who may have been registered for some time, but suddenly started commenting.”

Some newspapers, however, still manually monitor comments. Even with three editors to divvy up the task, Pierce spends about an hour a day pre-screening each comment that users leave on every article on the Los Angeles Times and the LA Now blog sites.

But in the digital age of endless deadlines and dwindling resources, monitoring may fall last on the to-do list. Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Robert J. Lopez attests to this.

“Stuff just falls through the cracks,” said Lopez. “The reality is there isn’t much personnel to do all that, especially when news breaks.”

Which raises the questions: why do newspapers still include comments when resources are scarce and editors could be using their time doing more quality journalism? And is creating a quality discussion equivalent to quality journalism?

Similar questions were brought up at the APME Online Credibility Workshop last May, an effort Knoxville News Sentinel initiated to reach a consensus on when to remove commenters and ban users.

“A certain percentage of users feel the comments area are their area and not ours,” said Lail.  “And a certain other percentage of users hold us responsible, at least in part, for everything that is posted on the Website.”

Perhaps the answer to this dialectic problem lies in having readers participate in the monitoring process.

The OC Register implemented a policy that gives readers the ability to silence commenters through flagging, said Online Quality Checker Carol Priest. For users who find a comment objectionable, a “remove comment” button appears next to every post. OC Register revised its policy two years ago — it now takes only two readers for a post to come down.

Following policies like that of MinnPost — which holds their readers accountable by requiring that they register and use their full name to comment — may free up editors and actually encourage constructive dialogue.

On another hand, the inconsistency with commenting policies may stem from news organizations not fully accepting user-generated content. According to a recent article, Dr. Piet Bakker found in his study about Dutch newspapers and user-generated content that the news value of comments is nominal. News organizations tend to use comments not for their newsworthiness but as a way to drive traffic and keep users coming back. Perhaps before a news organization decides on its commenting policy, it should redefine its relationship with the audience and embrace participatory journalism.

Which of these cases is closest to how your news organization handles comments? Is it time to start rethinking and reframing this essential part of Web culture? Take this opportunity to sound off in — you guessed it — the comments.

Useful links:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=103&aid=123290

http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

http://www.wiredjournalists.com/forum/topics/worth-talking-about-do-you

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/roll/2009/06/last-week-we-put-up.html

Breaking the News

Once the story was posted and the official announcement by the President’s Office was made we started to spread the word through a variety of means: posting on Twitter, sending emails to the student list-serve, and good old word of mouth. Our goal was to get students and community members onto the site to read about the decision and comment on it. The results showed some interesting information concerning the roles these different modes of communication played.

First, Whitman is far from a “Twitter-heavy” campus. I know of a few dozen students and staff who use it, and most of those don’t post too frequently. Thus, I was definitely interested in what type of traffic our posts on Twitter would drive to the site. The results aren’t so encouraging though. Out of over 1,200 visitors over a 3-day period only 9 (less than 1%) came from Twitter. Furthermore, these visitors only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site. Not very heartening to someone trying to use Twitter to increase traffic to our site.

While the community may not be awake to the power of Twitter, Whitman is definitely fond of email list-servs. Over the course of a couple days we posted multiple announcements to the general student list-serve about the article. This drove over 100 visitors (more than 10% of our traffic). Also, these visitors were much more likely to spend time reading the article as most spent over 2 minutes on the page.

We were also interested in seeing how word spread about the article over Facebook. We didn’t post anything to the site, but it appears that others used it to send the link to friends. Over the 3-day period we received 19 visitors from Facebook (about 2%) without having to do a thing. College students may not be using Twitter to communicate yet, but they definitely use Facebook.

Finally, it seems that the best method for getting people to visit the site was to place a banner on the top of the homepage. This linked directly to the article until we were able to put together full coverage of the event. This method resulted in more than 700 visitors (or, 68%) over the 3 days. Furthermore, this visitors spent far longer (almost 4 minutes) on the page.

Takeaways for Next Time

Overall, the whole experience was very informative. Our new WordPress-powered site really made it all possible because, were it not for having a quick and easy way to push out content digitally, the Pioneer would have had to wait until Thursday to print an issue with articles about the cuts. It was also a bit of a reality check for my expectations of Twitter. Ultimately, if the campus community isn’t using it, then updates sent out via Twitter will largely be irrelevant.

Also, with more than 20 comments left on the main article this really showed the need for the site to have a forum feature (which I’ll be adding over the coming weeks). If we had this in place at the beginning, I think that student and community discussion would have been much more productive.

In the end, this was our first real test of covering breaking news digitally and then covering in print later on. We seem to have done alright, but I know there’s things we could have done better. Anyone else cover a recent breaking news story on their campus? I’d love to hear suggestions, ideas, and solutions.

This got me thinking quite a bit about exactly why that is. Many who write about the murder of newspapers at the hands of digital media make it seem as if it is inevitable. As if to say, it must be so, because the Internet is much more shinier and newer than newsprint, and therefore must obviously be newsprint’s destroyer.

I find fault in this attribution of Darwinian evolution to our forms of media.

For the most part, our industry has looked at the Internet as either an opposing force or a distasteful side-dish that has to be served in order to appease the people. Again, I don’t believe that either has to be the case. There are ways of harnessing digital content and making it work in partnership with your print content, meshing the two together.

So, recently while searching for ways that people play with information on their phones, I came across an article on property realtors using 2D barcodes to promote their home listings. The idea of using these little codes commercially is to me, nothing short of genius. Realtors print the codes on their signs, along with instructions on how to use them, and the person walking by can instantly download the full information sheet on the property as they are standing in front of it.

What’s even cooler is that these squares of data can be embedded with links to pretty much any content online you can think of — a full Web site, an MP3 file, a video clip — and printed at the end of an article or in a side box. This, needless to say, opens up a world of potential between bridging the gap between our news site’s content and our print content.

The Vanguard will be using them to hardlink our articles to audio clips of speakers at presentations or events we cover, audio content from concerts or bands we review in the arts section, as well as allow our readers to download the location, time, and directions to an upcoming show or speaking event we preview, to name a few uses.

There’s a few code types out there that can be scanned by phones, but for our purposes we decided to use the QR code popular in Japan, over the U.S.-based Data Matrix or any of the other options such as Beetagg or Aztec. Mostly this is a comfort thing.

Our news editor spent 6 months in Japan this last year and said that the codes were all over the place on billboards, store fronts, magazines, etc. and frequently used by all kinds of people with phones. We ran a test series of QR codes on newsprint at varying sizes, and at all sizes they successfully were picked up by a code reader.

Code generation is free and generators can be found all over the Internet in many formats. Google even has an API you can download for the task.

Code readers are also free for people to download to their phones, and they work with your mobile device’s camera. Some phones come pre-installed with them now (Nokia has about half a dozen models that come preloaded with a code reader), but for those that don’t, either a visit to the manufacturer’s Web site or (in the case of the iPhone) a trip to the App Store will take care of that in about five minutes.

Next week we’ll be debuting the codes to our readers and running instructions regularly for awhile on how to use them. Everyone here is pretty excited to see how the codes are received by people, and I’m even more excited to find more new ways to mesh print with digital.