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