{"id":258668,"date":"2015-02-25T17:23:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T22:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258668"},"modified":"2024-11-26T16:08:08","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T21:08:08","slug":"while-others-shut-down-comments-the-nyt-wants-to-expand-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2015\/02\/25\/while-others-shut-down-comments-the-nyt-wants-to-expand-them\/","title":{"rendered":"While others shut down comments, the NYT wants to expand them"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If there was a ranking of popularity for online behavior, internet comments would probably wind up somewhere just below pop-up ads or auto-play videos. Seen by many as a haven for trolls and spam, a number of sites \u2014 including Popular Science and Bloomberg \u2014 have gotten rid of them<\/a>. But there are still those who believe allowing readers to comment is a worthwhile endeavor, and the New York Times<\/em> appears to belong to this group: instead of getting rid of comments, the paper says it plans to expand<\/a> its commenting features and invest more resources in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Community editor Bassey Etim told public editor Margaret Sullivan that in contrast to some other organizations, the Times<\/em> sees the readers who leave comments on its site as a \u201ccelebrity class\u201d of users<\/a>, and wants to give them more features and recognize their contributions. How exactly it plans to do that isn\u2019t clear, but Etim said the number of Times<\/em> stories that are open to comments will increase \u2014 from an average of about 20 each day to more than twice that (opinion columns are almost always open).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike many of the other organizations that have chosen to kill off their comments \u2014 including Re\/code, Reuters and The Week \u2014 the New York Times<\/em> apparently doesn\u2019t believe that social-media networks such as Twitter and Facebook can take the place of reader interaction directly on the Times<\/em> site. As I\u2019ve tried to argue before<\/a>, the fact that those tools exist should be seen as an addition to traditional commenting, not a replacement for it. In addition to the Times, sites like Quartz, Medium and Gawker have been experimenting with ways of improving comments<\/a> rather than killing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Those are real readers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Another common argument made by sites that have chosen to kill their comments is that the people who post comments aren\u2019t a publication\u2019s \u201creal\u201d readers, and\/or make up such a small proportion of the readership that they don\u2019t really matter. Bloomberg\u2019s online editor Joshua Topolsky, for example, said that the site would not<\/a> have comments after a redesign because the number of people who would be served by them was so minuscule:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201dYou\u2019re really talking about less than one percent of the overall audience that\u2019s engaged in commenting, even if it looks like a very active community. In the grand scheme of the audience, it doesn\u2019t represent the readership.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This kind of comment ignores a number of things, however: One is that an active community of readers should never be ignored, even if some of them behave badly from time to time (and in fact that kind of behavior only increases<\/a> if you ignore them). And the second is that even if the number of people who comment is low, the number of readers who pay attention to comments is arguably a lot higher \u2014 given the traditional social-media rule of thumb that says 90 percent of people read or lurk, with only one percent taking action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"New<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

New York Times<\/em> public editor Margaret Sullivan, who spent part of her column discussing the problems that readers have with the NYT\u2019s comments \u2014 including having comments not show up, or not being able to post them from the West Coast because a story has already been closed to new comments \u2014 said she believes that comments<\/a> are a key part of the newspaper\u2019s relationship with its readers. While the Times<\/em> system is not perfect, she said, \u201creader commenting is one of the best ways for The Times to stay close to its readers and what they care most about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NYT isn\u2019t the only major publication that believes comments have value: Aron Pilhofer, the head of digital for The Guardian<\/em> in London \u2014 and the former head of the digital team at the New York Times<\/em> \u2014 said at the recent News:Rewired conference that he believes media organizations<\/a> who choose to shut down their comments are making a huge mistake:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201dI feel very strongly that digital journalism needs to be a conversation with readers. This is one, if not the most important area of emphasis that traditional newsrooms are actually ignoring. You see site after site killing comments and moving away from community \u2013 that\u2019s a monumental mistake\u2026 readers need and deserve a voice. They should be a core part of your journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The audience-development team at the Times<\/em> is said to be working on a number of potential enhancements to the commenting function at the paper, changes that are expected to build on some earlier features and experiments with added functionality \u2014 such as the introduction of \u201cverified commenter\u201d status in 2011<\/a>. Verified commenters are selected by the Times<\/em> based on their previous behavior and can post comments without having them be moderated before they appear (the paper has a moderation team of about 13 people).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I argued at the time, the verified-commenter feature could have been the first step in getting some devoted Times<\/em> readers to \u201clevel up\u201d or become more involved in a community of readers at the paper, a relationship that could then be monetized in a number of ways. The Times<\/em> is also a partner \u2014 along with a number of other media organizations such as the Washington Post<\/em> \u2014 in a project being run by the Mozilla Foundation, called The Coral Project<\/a>, which is building an open-source platform for reader interaction, including comments.<\/p>\n

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If there was a ranking of popularity for online behavior, internet comments would probably wind up somewhere just below pop-up ads or auto-play videos. Seen by many as a haven for trolls and spam, a number of sites \u2014 including Popular Science and Bloomberg \u2014 have gotten rid of them. But there are still those who … <\/p>\n

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