2017 will be the year news comments finally start pulling their weight.
The recent wave of news sites nixing comments illustrates the complicated relationship most organizations have with comment sections. By turning comments off, publishers deliberately turn away the same “active users” that make social platforms like Facebook so valuable to advertisers.
And it’s no surprise, given the terrible choice publishers face in managing their comments. Either commit significant resources to heavy-handed round-the-clock police work, or stand back and watch the space below articles become a festering hellhole of harassment, spam, and abuse. Few organizations have the bandwidth to figure out how to get people to improve their behavior online.
But audiences are hungry for trusted news and debate outside the walled gardens of the big echo-chamber platforms, and advertisers are increasingly anxious about feeding Facebook’s monopoly on customer access and attention. Media organizations are the natural and traditional bridge between the two, despite the chaos brought on by the sudden migration to digital.
When you figure out how to improve comment sections without taking resources away from the newsroom, new opportunities open up. In the next year, armed with a new set of behavior-modifying platform tools, publishers will finally turn their comment sections into valuable assets, into the foundation of their response to Facebook’s incursions. Peel back the layers of abuse, and you’re left with an incredible combination: trusted, high-quality news content combined with real, active social networks, on the same page, under the same roof.
By this time next year, we’ll be wondering how news sites ever survived without comments.
Aja Bogdanoff is cofounder and CEO at Civil, makers of Civil Comments.
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
David Weigel A test for online speech
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news