The Martha’s Vineyard Times is launching a major review and overhaul of our online comment feature. The first step in our process was an email to many commenters this past weekend from executive editor Jamie Stringfellow, reminding them of our terms of use and committing ourselves to their enforcement.
As publishers struggle to find the right calculus by which both journalism and business models can be successfully sustained, no small part of the battle will be shaped by communications technology and its challenge to how we — journalists, publishers, and readers — harness it as we do our jobs.
With a history stretching back to “bulletin board” features in the 1980s, the online comments we’re accustomed to seeing — stories followed by “threads” of reader-led commentaries and conversations — began showing up around 2000, enabled by software advances and promoted by industry gurus preaching engagement and publishers eager for visitor traffic.
With reader comments providing free content and attracting yet more readers at the same time, publishers of all stripes embraced ubiquitous comment technology. What publishers and editors didn’t anticipate, however, was the extent to which online communities would move away from the decorum of engagement via letters to the editor while embracing the anarchic style of communication rapidly developing in the world of social media, especially fueled by the anonymity social media embraces.
By 2010 or so, many commenting features were turning into combative, antisocial cul-de-sacs, and the clarity of hindsight tells us that the free lunch of valuable “user-generated content” was illusory. Useful and substantive content requires editorial commitment, not just easy-to-use software. Most famously starting at Popular Science (in 2013), followed by dozens of sites such as Reuters, the Chicago Sun-Times, CNN, Bloomberg, the Verge, the Week, outgunned editors and publishers began eliminating the commenting function.
The MV Times was a fairly early adopter of online reader comments. We liked the immediacy they offered, and we valued the engagement and the connection to readers we could achieve. We have always wanted lively exchanges, and feel, as Michael Erard wrote in the New York Times (“No Comments,” Sept. 20, 2013) that “the worst places to visit aren’t the jungles … but the perfectly manicured comment lawns of some newspapers. Papers have mistakenly treated comments as the digital equivalents of letters to the editor.”
We learned, though, that our hopes for open and challenging dialogue in the respectful context of our small community would be hard to contain without serious moderating, which proved to be a slippery slope. We seem to be always threading a rhetorical needle as we try to give commenters latitude to express themselves while also trying to honor our requirement for fundamental civility in the face of rapidly changing digital and social media standards. We’ve employed different moderating schemes and adopted different levels of tolerance. It’s never been a comfortable fit.
Presently we’re in the process of revising the mvtimes.com website. It’s an opportunity to clarify and hone our objectives, and it’s appropriate to do the same with our comment feature: What are our goals, what problem does a comment feature solve, and how do we match our standards and our resources with the diverse interests and styles of our site’s visitor community?
It’s very early in our process, but there are some very interesting approaches being developed by our newspaper cohorts. For one thing, it has become commonplace for even the largest organizations to selectively focus their efforts on behalf of their online communities. At the New York Times, notwithstanding a dedicated online community editor and permanent staff, only some articles (about 10 percent of all they publish) are open for comment at all, and those comments are up for only 24 hours. Comments on the Guardian articles are open for three days. The German daily newspaper and web publication Süddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the Panama Papers story, takes comments on three to five stories or topics per day. Looking at comment quality, as opposed to quantity, research findings from the World Association of Newspaper Publishers show that the highest-value comments cluster around news analysis and opinion. And ongoing industry research shows a significant preference for comment communities that include journalists and experts, in addition to readers.
Apart from joining the ranks of newspapers and other sites that are simply giving up on comments, whatever we do will be resource-intensive. But it’s not just about comments. As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen emailed Michael Erard about comment features, “Have ’em, don’t have ’em. Both are defensible. What matters is how interactive and reachable the editors and authors are, and how committed they are to a two-way relationship with readers.”
Stay tuned for changes.
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