{"id":4745,"date":"2009-09-18T16:14:34","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T20:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=4745"},"modified":"2009-09-18T16:14:34","modified_gmt":"2009-09-18T20:14:34","slug":"newspapers-get-the-comments-they-deserve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2009\/09\/18\/newspapers-get-the-comments-they-deserve\/","title":{"rendered":"Newspapers get the comments they deserve"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I became the first “communities editor” for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto almost a year ago<\/a>, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes for a good community – a healthy community – and what makes for a bad one. I’ve looked at every newspaper I can think of and tried to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I’ve looked at non-media communities like Metafilter<\/a> and Slashdot<\/a> and even (so help me) 4chan. I’ve looked at research into real-world communities and how they evolve, and why some thrive and some die out.<\/p>\n

There are all sorts of manifestations of community on news sites – blogs, wikis, etc. – but one of the most fundamental elements of community is reader comments. Some media outlets only allow comments on certain stories; some pre-moderate, while others wait for readers to flag unpleasant comments and then remove them. Some sites do the moderating themselves; others outsource to companies like ICUC<\/a> in Winnipeg. But everyone sees the value of comments, right? Wrong. <\/p>\n

The reality is that – as Alfred Hermida<\/a> of the University of British Columbia journalism school<\/a> writes at MediaShift<\/a> – many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value. Hermida writes about research presented at the recent Future of Journalism<\/a> conference in Wales (where he presented his “Twitter as ambient journalism<\/a>” paper) that said most journalists see comments as containing very little news, and mainly view them as a nuisance.<\/p>\n

(please read the rest of this post<\/a> at the Neiman Journalism Lab)<\/p>\n

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Since I became the first “communities editor” for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto almost a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes for a good community – a healthy community – and what makes for a bad one. I’ve looked at every newspaper I can think of and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Newspapers get the comments they deserve”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}