For the most part, past media offerings have been a one-way experience. While this was OK in the past, future generations of media consumers are growing up with bigger expectations. They want to interact and communicate. Two-way journalism is a way of reestablishing trust with the public by starting an ongoing, evolving conversation – a community.
Preparing the Soil (Software)
While there are many types of web applications that allow for community (blogs, wikis, etc.), I want to concentrate on forums (also called bulletin boards). All too often, these areas of newspaper sites are overlooked.
On the positive side, forums are usually user friendly, offering people an easy way to keep up with conversations developing online. They’re also familiar to readers because newspapers have used them since the very early days.
They do lack some of the more advanced moderation features, though, like the ability for people to rate other people’s comments.
Chris Willis of Hypergene believes moderation is critical “… as evidenced by the growth and continued success of Wikipedia, Criagslist and eBay. Each plays a strong role in its community when needed to make sure the community is allowed to flourish.
“Message boards are notoriously poor at this for several reasons. They, mostly, resemble a glorified e-mail thread where every voice has equal weighting and flame posts can take on life of their own. It is also inherently difficult to follow any thread.”
Newspapers, of course, aren’t the only ones doing community online. If you look beyond newspaper sites, you begin to see that there’s been a lot of evolution in the tools available to build online community. Slashdot has a complicated Karma system that gives moderation duty to people in batches, letting them rate comments in conversations they may or may not have been involved in. Other sites, like Kuro5hin, allow some of their users the ability to vote to hide comments on their own.
If newspapers are going to grow successful communities online, they need to look beyond just dropping an out-of-the-box forum system on their Web site. They should be developing software that takes the best of what forums have to offer while adding features such as moderation of individual posts. By opening the moderation responsibilities to the site as a whole, you have a greater chance of increasing plants and getting rid of weeds.
Protecting Your Garden (Legal Aspects)
Suppose for a moment that your garden is going good when some miscreant decides to plant poppy or marijuana plants in middle of it. Are you responsible for people planting stuff in your garden? What if the plant/post is libelous or illegal in nature? Are you even more responsible? Even if you weed/edit?
Written to overturn an earlier ruling regarding moderation of posts, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as
the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).
According to Jonathan D. Hart of Dow, Lohnes & Albertson, in Washington D.C., “… the dominant view is that a web publisher does not take on responsibility for message board postings merely because it edits those postings. Instead, a publisher would be libel for the content of message board postings only if its edits gave rise to or aggravated the libel.”
Another area to be concerned with is your privacy policy. While some users think anonymity is a right they have in your virtual community, it might be a good idea to remind them that in some extreme cases, records may be handed over to authorities.
As with most things on the Internet, the legal aspects of publishing user content on your site change frequently. It’s important to stay up to date with legal rulings about publishing online.
For example, Hart noted, “The California Supreme Court is currently reviewing a decision of an intermediate appellate court that concluded that a Web publisher can be held liable for third-party content once the publisher has been put on notice of the libelous nature of the speech. In the view of the appellate court, once a Web publisher is informed that a message board posting is libelous, it would become responsible as the publisher of that posting if it failed to take it down.”
Know the plants (Social Networks)
To grow a garden well, you have to know what type of plants the soil will support. The same holds true for online community – you need to know a little bit about why people contribute.
In Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman’s We Media (PDF), they list the reasons people contribute as:
- To gain status or build reputation in a given community
- To create connections with others who have similar interests, online and off
- Sense-making and understanding
- To inform and be informed
- To entertain and be entertained
- To create
While Internet trolls might fall under the fifth reason, they need to be considered on their own when trying to grow your community. If you see a weed and let it go, it’s going to spread. The same applies to Internet trolls. ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ can be replaced with ‘don’t water the weeds!’
Tending the Garden (Managing Community)
If you run one of the popular forum scripts, a lot of the moderation will come down to one or a few people. With the size of newsrooms around the country still shrinking, most publishers don’t want to dedicate one person to babysit a forum and actively moderate it. The problem with that is that any decent garden needs to be tended to constantly. One idea that might work in this case is that of volunteer moderators. Think of them as day laborers who work free for a portion of the harvest (the conversations).
If you spend more than a week looking at your forums at least once a day, you’ll soon notice who the ‘regulars’ are and start to form opinions about the personalities of the people posting. If you’ve followed the forums growth from the beginning, you’ll also know who the old-timers are. If you haven’t been around since the launch of the forums, looking at user registration dates and activity will give you a good picture of who’s who in your virtual community. You could also just start a thread asking for help, or have the members of the forum nominate moderators for you.
Whether you e-mail them separately or post something transparent in a forum thread, the chances are high that you will have people interested in helping manage the community. Knowing that people are subjective by nature, it’s a good idea to try to choose moderators that represent different ends of various spectrums, be they political or otherwise. I would also recommend getting real names and a phone number from these moderators so you can call and talk to them personally. While not absolutely necessary, it’s a good way to weed out people who won’t take the responsibilities seriously.
After you have a group of moderators, there are numerous ways you can handle their duties. One is to give them generic accounts with names like moderator1, moderator2, etc. Doing it this way, there’s less of a chance their warnings will be taken personally. Also, this gives them a means to respond subjectively (their own account) and an account where they can consciously try to be more objective.
The moderators can also use their forum names to do their moderation. This way is a little more personal, but there’s a chance the moderators will be hunted down and constantly pestered about decisions they made in the past. One of the first conversations you have with your volunteers might be about whether to be anonymous.
Another good idea is to set up a separate area of the forum that only moderators can access. Most forum software will allow you to do this. This can be a place where questionable threads or posts can be moved so the moderators can discuss them with you and the other moderators before taking action. It also helps allow the moderators to bond, forming a mini-community within the community.
In addition to volunteer moderators, reporters are another possibility for forum moderation. You may not have the resources to dedicate one person to growing your community, but if each reporter spent a few minutes on the forums each day, the chance of noticing problems goes up. Also, by participating in the forums, they can find new sources, gather story ideas and get a pulse on what the community is talking about.
I would recommend using their real names so that people see their online presence as an extension of their real world status. A page explaining that the reporters are there in a semi-official manner might be a good idea. That is, explain that on the forums the reporters may be subjective as well as objective when talking about issues. Not everyone agrees, though.
Jennifer Scott, Online Editor at nwitimes.com, wrote in an email, “The Times does not encourage staff members to participate in discussion nor is it banned. I think the reporters and editors would have to be very careful in what discussions they participate and it would be wise for them to avoid topics in which they report.”
On June 8 of this year, The Times posted a message saying that all nwitimes.com employees would be identified as such on the forums and that no reporters or editors would be participating in the discussion.
Even if they don’t interact with the community officially, though, they can still be an extra set of eyes to catch small problems on the forums before they become big problems. Get to the weeds before they grow out of control. As Chris Willis put it, “Know who should not be in your community.”
Speaking of anonymity, there’s something to be said for making forum users use their real names. It’s a tough question. If you force people to use their real names, you might get higher quality posts (or, at least posts not as offensive), but less people might sign-up and participate. If you’re moderating, though, giving people a little anonymity and watching their interaction with the community, you might end up with more signal overall.
Chris Willis on anonymity:
“… there is a natural reward for participants to be more forthcoming if security issues can be addressed properly. Greater disclosure can result in greater trust, reputation and more meaningful collaboration.
“From my observations, anonymity is more than a name. People seem helpless to not share intimate or personal details in their conversation/interactions that they would rarely share with coworkers or neighbors.”
I think at this point it’s best to let the members of your community decide if they want to use their real names or not. Some publishers might try to force people to use their real names to participate as a quick fix for Internet trolls, but if you look at sites like Slashdot and K5, you can see that with the right moderation you can maintain a pleasant plant/weed ratio while allowing anonymity.
Photos from MorgueFile
About K.Paul Mallasch
Online communities have been major sources for old media outlets as well. Increasingly my own employer, a primarily print outlet, has been culling new contributor talent from internet forums in our subject field, especially so when it comes to photographers.
One of the things I’d like to have seen this article address would have been moderator burnout. I’ve been a moderator on three separate forums, one of them for over three years, and I’ve seen many on the staff develop severe stresses and anxieties due to their moderating duties. Eventually they burn out and many have to be replaced, or at least spelled for a considerable “recuperation” time.
Lastly, regarding the comments on participation by media employees on forums, I and some of my fellow staffers are on at least three different forums in one form or another, but often times we keep a lower profile. Forums tend to get fairly personal quickly, and getting too involved in them — much less either defending the magazine constantly, or divulging too much of the inner workings — is something most of us feel uncomfortable with. Myself, since hiring, have scaled back my participation in many forums simply because I now represent not just myself, as I did as a freelancer, but my firm as well.
[[Online communities have been major sources for old media outlets as well. Increasingly my own employer, a primarily print outlet, has been culling new contributor talent from internet forums in our subject field, especially so when it comes to photographers.]]
This is good news for the few getting into it.
[[One of the things I’d like to have seen this article address would have been moderator burnout. I’ve been a moderator on three separate forums, one of them for over three years, and I’ve seen many on the staff develop severe stresses and anxieties due to their moderating duties. Eventually they burn out and many have to be replaced, or at least spelled for a considerable “recuperation” time.]]
Good question. I guess I would say use the ‘tag-team’ style. That is, formally or informally have certain people in charge of ‘certain days’ to be the moderator.
Also, increasing the pool of available moderators helps. Even if some of your best moderators ‘burn out’ you have up and coming moderators, etc. It’s a constant process.
Anyone else have any other ideas to add to moderator ‘burn out’?
[[Lastly, regarding the comments on participation by media employees on forums, I and some of my fellow staffers are on at least three different forums in one form or another, but often times we keep a lower profile. Forums tend to get fairly personal quickly, and getting too involved in them — much less either defending the magazine constantly, or divulging too much of the inner workings — is something most of us feel uncomfortable with. Myself, since hiring, have scaled back my participation in many forums simply because I now represent not just myself, as I did as a freelancer, but my firm as well.]]
Is there a policy where you work? If HR doesn’t have one, you might help them create one to put your mind at ease.
And yes, sometimes it’s more enjoyable lurking and/or using a pseudonym. It happens a lot at K5, I think – people having one main account and other accounts to ‘rant’ or what not.
I guess I would leave it up to the person who is posting, as long as they follow the employer’s written policy on blogging or ‘foruming’ or whatever. 😉
Thanks for the response.
-kpaul