Nieman Foundation at Harvard
News organizations must treat reader comments with the same level of consideration that they treat their own stories, New York Times community editor Bassey Etim said today speaking on a panel at this year’s Computation + Journalism Symposium at Columbia University.
“We have to treat comments as content,” Etim said. “We can’t cede the social world to large companies.”
Etim, speaking on a panel about comment moderation and community building, discussed the Times’ attitude toward commenters and shared the results of a Times survey that asked commenters why they comment:
NYT survey on comments from @basseye #cj2015 pic.twitter.com/Zv0Df24ekT
— Nick Diakopoulos (@ndiakopoulos) October 2, 2015
Only 5 percent of Times commenters said they comment on stories to actually communicate with other, and Etim said that most readers prefer the comments that Times editors choose to highlight. News organizations, he said, need to make building community around news more of a priority. (Though, of course, that’s easy for an editor from the Times to say when, unlike most news organizations, it has a full-time staff dedicated to moderating comments.)
A Community department that is focused and dedicated can tell the comments section's story cohesively. Yes to that. #CJ2015 @BasseyE
— Francesca Giuliani (@The_ItAlien) October 2, 2015
"We're failing every single day when we don't integrate the views of our readers into the national discourse" @BasseyE #CJ2015
— Carolyn Gearig (@carolyngearig) October 2, 2015
#cj2015 @BasseyE advocating stopping comments that don't fit the mission of the org — and most news orgs today are about communication
— The Brown Institute (@BrownInstitute) October 2, 2015
At NYT commenters like the idea that they are being judged by editors as much as the writers are. #cj2015
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) October 2, 2015
Often "point of community @ a news org isn't to create a club" bc it's just catering to a small group who'd be there anyway @BasseyE #cj2015
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) October 2, 2015
The symposium is sponsored by Columbia’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and it continues through Saturday. If you’re not in New York, you can follow along on Twitter using #CJ2015 or you can watch a livestream, which we’ve embedded below.
One comment:
We’ve said exactly that for years. Comments ARE content. As a *truly* small company, we are amused to see the NY Times apparently considering itself a small (well, not AS large as the social monsters) company – but bless them for recognizing the truth, and neither allowing a free-for-all commentsphere nor taking the cowardly way out and just abandoning on-site comments. Two major ways to regard “comments ARE content”: #1 – you get content from commenters (advancing the story, asking questions that lead to new stories, etc.) and #2 – you need to moderate. You do not have to publish every comment; you need to have rules and enforce them, and you need to be aware that you won’t have a rule to apply to every potential “that’s not publishable” comment … that’s just the way it goes. P.S. You have to participate in comment discussions to truly embrace them. If micro-orgs like us can manage it, big (sorry, NYT, you ARE big) companies can too.
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