{"id":258680,"date":"2015-02-03T17:33:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T22:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258680"},"modified":"2024-01-25T18:21:54","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T23:21:54","slug":"guardian-digital-editor-is-right-ending-comments-is-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2015\/02\/03\/guardian-digital-editor-is-right-ending-comments-is-a-mistake\/","title":{"rendered":"Guardian digital editor is right \u2014 ending comments is a mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

No one seems to like web comments any more, at least not in the traditional media anyway. Websites like Reuters and Re\/code and Popular Science and Bloomberg\u00a0have gotten rid of them<\/a>, and plenty of media insiders have been cheering this movement on, since they see comment sections as cesspools. So it\u2019s nice to hear someone like\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0digital editor Aron Pilhofer\u00a0say killing off comments is<\/a>\u00a0a \u201cmonumental mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a talk at the News:Rewired conference in London, Pilhofer \u2014 who used to run the digital team at the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, before joining the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0last year \u2014 said that many traditional newsrooms\u00a0are failing to take full advantage<\/a>\u00a0of the web\u2019s ability to create a two-way relationship with readers, and that this is a crucial element of what journalism has become in a digital age. As he put it: \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\n\n\n

Open journalism<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Pilhofer talked about how the Guardian<\/em> looks at its audience, which is as a partner in its journalism, through projects like Guardian Witness<\/a> \u2014 a site where readers can suggest story ideas and also become involved in the reporting of them \u2014 which emerged from its repeated experiments in \u201ccrowdsourcing.\u201d For the British paper, the concept of \u201copen journalism\u201d<\/a> as a dialogue between reporters and readers has been a central part of its mandate under outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"paidContent<\/a>
Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief, The Guardian paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau \/ itsmebert.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The fact that I agree whole-heartedly with Pilhofer probably won\u2019t come as a surprise to anyone who has been reading Gigaom over the past few years: I\u2019ve argued repeatedly that<\/a> real and ongoing engagement with readers \u2014 which involves more than just a passive \u201cHere\u2019s our content, please click on it\u201d kind of relationship \u2014 is a crucial part of what journalism is now, in part because this trusted relationship with readers is the only real asset<\/a> that media companies have left to monetize in an increasingly competitive landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Projects like Guardian Witness are the kinds of things that all media companies should be doing more of, Pilhofer said<\/a>, because reader engagement is \u201ca huge resource we are largely ignoring\u201d as an industry. That\u2019s the bottom line: not so much whether a newspaper or news site has comments or not, but whether it is trying to reach out to its readers in any real way and make them part of its journalism. Or do they just see the audience as a giant click factory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All readers matter<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Whenever I try to make this point, someone inevitably says that of course they want to have a relationship with their readers, but comments aren\u2019t the way to do it, because they are just a cesspool of bad behavior \u2014 and\/or because the people who post in the comments aren\u2019t their\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0readers, as Bloomberg editor Joshua Topolsky\u00a0argued in an interview<\/a>\u00a0about the site\u2019s redesign: \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\n\n\n

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

Topolsky\u2019s is a common response to comments: \u201cThose people aren\u2019t our real readers, so we can afford to ignore them, and pay attention only to the people who choose to be on the social networks that we frequent, like Twitter and Facebook.\u201d But what about the people who don\u2019t want to have<\/a> their comments tied to their identity on Facebook \u2014 or the readers who choose not to belong to those social networks at all? They in effect become second-class citizens, whose opinions or input aren\u2019t wanted or valued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On top of that problem, the readers who are on those networks still have to seek out the commentary on the stories they are interested in discussing. Tools exist to pull responses from Twitter and Facebook back into a comment section on a news site, but few publishers use them. It seems that most would rather outsource their commenting<\/a> \u2014 and by extension, their relationship with their readers \u2014 to these third-party networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But comments are unfixable, right? Or at least, without spending huge amounts of time and resources on them. That\u2019s another common response when anyone proposes that they not be killed off. But some sites have shown that it is possible to improve them without an enormous resource commitment: Digiday wrote recently about how comments<\/a> at Salon improved dramatically once someone started to pay attention to them, and took a few steps to encourage good behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comments aren\u2019t the ultimate expression of community or a relationship with readers by any means. Social networks are also very powerful tools in different ways. But if you can\u2019t figure out how to engage with your readers and build a community of some kind on your own website \u2014 around your own content \u2014 how can you expect any of your readers to take your commitment to that relationship seriously?<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one seems to like web comments any more, at least not in the traditional media anyway. Websites like Reuters and Re\/code and Popular Science and Bloomberg\u00a0have gotten rid of them, and plenty of media insiders have been cheering this movement on, since they see comment sections as cesspools. So it\u2019s nice to hear someone … <\/p>\n

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