The writing on the wall: Why news organizations are turning to outside moderators for help with comments

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April 20, 2011, 10 a.m.

The writing on the wall: Why news organizations are turning to outside moderators for help with comments

By Justin Ellis

When a news organization decides to have someone else deal with their online comments, it’s sometimes seen as waving the white flag or the equivalent of dumping a problem child at a boarding school. (And that’s before the word “outsourcing” starts getting thrown around.) But look at it from the angle of time and resources in a newsroom: Would you rather have online staff spend their time playing traffic cop in the comments or producing work for the site?

It’s straightforward arithmetic, though somewhat slanted depending on the value you place on comments (i.e., whether you think they contribute to your site) and whether you have money. To borrow a line from The A-Team, “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire…comment moderators.”

Most recently, The Boston Globe joined NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle as clients of ICUC Moderation Services, a Winnipeg-based company that deals in, as the name hints, moderating online content. The sacrifice in going outside is giving up the hands-on approach to building online community — but some news orgs probably don’t want to put their hands into something they consider a cesspool.

Keith Bilous, ICUC’s president, says hiring outside help with comments not only frees up newsroom resources, but also makes outlets consider what they want out of comments. “The focus is on getting more better-quality comments and conversation on sites instead of ‘let’s just get as much comments as we can,’” Bilous told me.

Defining the goals of comments

And that’s because the first order of business when you hire a company like ICUC is to layout your commenting guidelines and procedures — essentially what Bilous calls “the Bible to how we manage the content and community.” While this is a necessary step for ICUC’s moderators to know what’s fair or foul, it’s also a chance to clarify why to have comments and what role they play on a site, he said. There’s a need to guard against slander or libel in your comment threads, not to mention the ever-swelling and always creative list of naughty words — but beyond that things start to vary.

“Moderating for the CBC is different than moderating for The Boston Globe or The San Francisco Chronicle,” he said. “They’re all very unique in the way their content is managed.”

One area where sites diverge is on whether to moderate comments before or after being published. There’s a case to be made for both approaches — the idea of honoring the audience’s ability to have their say immediately versus the ability to carefully tend the garden as it grows. Bilous argues either can work.

“Look at TSN, by volume of comments that come to the TSN website and CBC site — which are through the freakin’ roof frankly — they’re all pre-moderated and going up every month,” he said.

If there’s a more pressing question news sites should be dealing with, it’s knowing when to throw the off switch on comments. Not in the “Christmas is canceled” way, but in the “maybe this isn’t the best story to include comments on” way. Bilous calls it “situational comments,” because he’s seeing more sites become selective with what stories they’ll allow comments on. A number of newspapers, like the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, automatically turn off comments on stories about topics like suicide, race, or gay rights. The challenge for editors, Bilou said, is knowing when stories can lead to useful community discussion and when they’ll descend into chaos.

With that in mind, Bilous has three pieces of advice for editors and managers to consider about comments: Be transparent about your policy and decisions. Always be willing to ask if comments are needed on an individual story. And, maybe most importantly, don’t be afraid to take a hit if bad things are said about your publication.

“We’re never going back to a web that is static, as in ‘here is a story no one can comment on,’” he said. “The audience is only being encouraged and conditioned to participate.”

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http://jonathanstray.com Jonathan Stray

In the US, I don’t believe there is a legal need to “guard against slander or libel in your comment threads.” Comments are protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, if I understand this previous NiemanLab post correctly.
http://www.niemanlab.org/ Joshua Benton

There’s not a legal need, strictly speaking, because of CDA 230, but if a news organization is going to have any kind of moderation policy at all for comments, avoiding “The county auditor is a child molester” comments is going to be at the top of their list.
http://twitter.com/mlicudine Michelle Licudine

One shortcut used here @pbpost is to remove commenting from anything categorized as a crime story. Those seem to be most likely to draw racist — and just plain cruel — comments.

Two of our sister pubs have turned off commenting altogether, though I believe it was because they were unable to prevent onslaughts of link spam rather than having a problem with general monitoring.

Do the moderation companies offer stronger methods for reducing spam?
Wizza

Is this a press release from ICUC that you’re publishing?
Anonymous

Confused: how do you reconcile “situational comments” (turning off article comments) with “we’re never going back to a web that’s static” (not turning off article comments)?

I’m just amazed at how there are thousands of websites, some more than 10 years old, devoted to commenting and discussion (Metafilter, anyone?) and yet newspapers are (once again) struggling. How do these Internet wunderkinds do it?

Perhaps its news corps’ sucky commenting systems? Or perhaps it’s corporate cultures that denigrate mixing it up with the unwashed masses (i.e., customers)? It’s the same tired story, all over again.

Outsourcing your relationship with your customers is a sure path to bankruptcy. It will not end well.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Bob-Payne/1302940631 Bob Payne

Justin, I cringed at this in the first paragraph: “But look at it from the angle of time and resources in a newsroom: Would you rather have online staff spend their time playing traffic cop in the comments or producing work for the site?” If you’re talking about a newspaper site, why assume worrying about comments is the province of the online staff? Why aren’t editors, reporters and clerks just as responsible? This is a major reason why most newspaper sites are failing at commenting implementation. They treat it as a technical feature handled by those “web people” rather than what it really should be: an effective tool for doing what newspapers do best — engaging with readers to both ask questions and find answers. Are there ofter threads full of useless drivel? Sure. But there are revelations as well if mind the store carefully and energetically.
http://www.niemanlab.org/ Joshua Benton

Bob, there’s a big distinction between policing the comments and engaging in the comments.

Assuming you want to put some sort of limits on user behavior, *someone* will have to be doing the policing work of making sure people aren’t being jerks, aren’t libeling people, aren’t threatening violence, aren’t spelling the f-word in new and creative ways, or whatever you’re worried about. That work, at many news organizations, falls to some segment of the online staff. At others, it’s the reporters. And at others, the job gets outsourced to people like ICUC.

But that’s a *separate* job from a reporter engaging in the comments in the sort of productive, journalism-enhancing, community-enhancing way you’re talking about. To the extent that they’re sometimes performed by the same people, in an organization of any size, I think that’s not particularly efficient.

The most tragic example I know of this was Paul Krugman’s post in 2009 noting that the reason people’s comments weren’t appearing on his blog was that, on the weekends back then, there was no NYT staffer on duty to moderate each comment and approve it for publication. So Paul Krugman had to do it himself. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. There is no way the most efficient use of his time on the weekend is checking 1,200 comments for obscenity.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/housekeeping-note-2/

So yes, I absolutely agree that engaging in the comments is something reporters should do. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a separate (and also important) job of policing them for bad behavior, and that, as far as I can tell, there’s no reason to make that scut work part of every reporter’s day.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Bob-Payne/1302940631 Bob Payne

Joshua – I hear you, but it’s tiresome to hear reporters say that the necessary cleanup is the web team’s problem, or that that’s why we shouldn’t have comments. Instead, maybe they can acknowledge that as an organization we need to find solutions, rather than saying ‘I don’t have time for that crap.’ Maybe we need more citizen monitors, or filters, or easier way for staffers to remove comments, ideas like that.
http://www.niemanlab.org/ Joshua Benton

I hear you too, Bob. And while I don’t know the specifics of how good a job ICUC and its competitors do, I’d suspect that if they do a good job of keeping the comments section “clean” (free of vitriol/libel/etc.), that could actually encourage reporters to view the comments more as an opportunity and less as a threat to their dignity, social norms, etc. But outsourcing it is just one tool, and there are lots of others, as you note.
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http://twitter.com/Harriet_Minter Harriet Minter

Trying to get journalists to engage with comments is a big enough problem as it is, we really need to get past the idea that journalism and engagement are separate things – they’re not.

There is a lot to be said for having moderators (either inhouse or outsourced) policing your comments but the bigger question is how to do you get worthwhile, engaged comments. The best way of doing this is making sure that commentors know what they say isn’t ignored. People speaking into the air will say anything, if they think there is a chance that the journo who wrote the original piece will engage with them if their comments are well-structured and interesting, they’re more likely to think before they write.

If newspapers want to get away from thousands of offensive and irrelevant comments, then they need to explain to journalists how they can be involved in community management and then make them do it.
Pingback: Gestão de comentários “outsourcing” : Ponto Media
http://www.justinellis.net Justin Ellis

Hi Bob – As someone who has worked in newsrooms I understand what you’re saying about whose “job” it is to deal with comments and frustration around that. I’d agree with what Josh said, there are separate jobs at play here, one to actually do the work of making sure comments don’t violate TOS or are otherwise not harmful, and the job of making comments productive.

But I think there’s something in there that goes beyond the sort of technical help that something like ICUC provides, it’s the job of making others see comments as worthwhile and a good use of time.

Believe me, I’ve had those conversations about “what’s the point, it’s a waste of time,” etc. That’s different than the conversation about whether we should/can afford outside help to simply police behavior. As I said in the piece, one possible reason for doing this is to free up resources for other things. You could argue that by having outside help it would enable staff more time to focus on how best to use/interact in the comments.
http://www.justinellis.net Justin Ellis

Well that’s the problem again with using the term “outsourcing” to describe what these news outlets are doing. There is nothing that precludes them from going in to moderate comments, and definitely nothing stopping them from having discussions in the comments. NPR is a good example of that and there are many individual writers that do try and engage people in the comments.

But you may hit on a larger point, one that frankly no one seems to have a good answer for, which is why commenting differs on news sites from other online communities. As I wrote a while ago for the Lab, my experience at a newspaper with my blog vs. my stories was completely different in terms of comments.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/10/no-comments-lessons-from-the-portland-press-herald/

While the blog comments were insightful and fun, comments on stories followed the typical path of comments on newspaper stories. Could there be a need for a clear policy on how reporters interact on comments? Maybe. Could it be that you’re dealing with a different type of audience on blogs, one that is more familiar with online discussion? Also maybe.
Paul Livingstone

The A Team ref is so money.
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Anonymous

I’m all for having moderators considering the language I’ve seen on some commentaries. What bothers me is that many times foul remarks get through which surprise me when there are moderators on a site.
http://www.microsourcing.com/disciplines/community-moderation.asp MicroSourcing

The thing with comment moderation is that there aren’t universal guidelines; a great deal of the standards depend on the moderator’s discretion. That’s why, in the event that moderation gets outsourced, the moderator’s values should be aligned with those of the client’s.
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