That said… Hi, I’m Noah, Robert Niles’ RA here at the OJR.

I get most of my best IT/tech story leads from readers, and I get them because I am viewed as approachable. I participate in Slashdot, NewsForge and Linux.com discussions and, more important, I reply to virtually all personally-addressed email I receive.

Back in the 70s, when I fixed cars and only wrote a little fiction on the side — back in the days when you could live decently on a blue collar wage — Mike Royko wrote something (about cars) that I thought was wrong.

I called him, long distance from San Francisco, at the number published at the bottom of his syndicated column. He answered his own phone. I told him what was bothering me. He asked questions. I answered them. A few days later he wrote a column based on our conversation, fleshed out with quotes from other mechanics.

I was surprised that this world-famous columnist not only answered his own phone, but made time to chat with a small-time foreign car mechanic halfway across the country. What I didn’t realize then, but know now, is that being approachable is one of the great keys to effective reporting.

In contrast with Royko’s approachability back then, nowadays email to editors and reporters at the two local papers in the Bradenton/Sarasota (Florida) area typically goes unanswered or draws stock/canned replies — except for the most widely-read Bradenton-area columnist and feature writer, who is almost insanely easy to reach.

Maybe that’s *why* he is so popular, eh?

In any case, one article I’d like to see, even if I end up researching and writing it myself, would be about the relative merits of story leads that come in via email, phone, fax, reader forums, and postal mail.

Is one source of leads typically more likely to lead to good stories than the others?

How does the signal:noise ratio in the different contact means compare?

And what about *asking* readers directly for information and leads? Does it work?

I know what my own experience tells me, but a sample of one is not good enough. It would take at least 20 interviews, and careful selection of interviewees, to make this little study worthwhile.

But that’s for another day. Today, being Labor Day, I will labor at setting up a new addition to my home office computer network that will (hopefully) help me make better – faster – cheaper software instruction videos.

I have become rather video-obsessed lately, up to and including a possible new “Internet TV” advertising concept that may make me as popular with cableco and local TV ad departments as Craig Newmark is with newspaper classified people.

http://www.yelvington.com/20060902/five_rules_for_building_a_successful_online_community

Summary: It’s not about technology, it’s about people.

You’re right in that terminology of some of the things is really important. That’s why i don’t think the Citizen Journalist name is gonna stick long term.

Anyway, thanks for sharing that. It’s been odd to me, running Scoop on our main site, that our forums (phpBB) sometimes get more activity/posts. I didn’t have it at first, but a lot of people were accustomed to that system (no threads) and wanted it.

I just keep telling myself that we’re in a transitionary period – that in another 5 or 10 or X number of years, the kids growing up today will laugh at the crudeness perhaps of some of our current technology to deal with online communities and conversation.

-kpaul

1) Moderation doesn’t need to be as complex as Slashdot’s geek-centric system. Just “good” and “bad” or more artful variations thereof are all most sites will ever need, and three comment “levels” are probably enough unless you get hundreds of comments per story, with the middle level as both posting and reading default.

2) A binary choice — “Reply to the article” or “Reply to this comment” — can create threads if they are appropriate, and will be obvious to even the least tech-savvy users. For low volume forums (fewer than 50 posts on most stories) I think a nested view is more useful than a threaded view. The main reason for a threaded view is to save bandwidth (and page loading time), and that’s less of a concern now than it was when we were gloating over our brand-new, super-fast 9600 baud modems.

(I’ve always used the “nested” view on Slashdot, even though when I started working on the site I only had a 28.8K dialup connection. Still, I had no problem with page loading times.)

3) I was on The WELL for a bit at the very beginning, but it was too expensive for me to keep for long. The high literacy level of WELL people was wonderful, and is probably why the service could handle long, convoluted, unthreaded conversations. Note, though, that even back then most online services had some sort of threading or nesting option. Also note that wonderful though it was, The WELL was never nearly as popular as Compu$serve, Genie, the Prod or even the old Quantum Computer Services BBS.*

4) Mr. Streight! Fancy meeting you here…

- Robin

* Quantum Computer Services later changed its name to America Online.

1) You must consider the sociology of your community (or target audience, if the community has not yet developed) when you decide how to implement a reader moderation system.

A couple years ago, when a spammer hit the discussion board on Violinist.com, I wrote a Slashdot-style moderation system for the site’s board.

Huge mistake. The violinists on the site are not math-savvy, competitive techies like the Slashdot crowd. The facts that some people could mod and others could not and that some people’s posts were rated higher than others stoked paranoia and anger throughout the community. After many attempts to explain the system, I finally junked it in favor of an alternate where logged-in readers could “flag” inappropriate posts. If a post gets three flags, it is pulled off the site, pending review. Any logged-in reader can flag, and no one’s posts are rated higher than others. For *this* community, that system’s worked delightfully. No problems since.

2) Obviously, we are not on OJR practicing what Robin preachers about threading. Though, to be honest, I don’t recall ever getting even 20 responses to an OJR article under our current publishing system. But if commenting becomes more popular, I would not hestitate to make the switch here.

But on Violinist.com, discussion are far more active and our “flat” response system does not accomodate forked discussions as cleanly as Groklaw’s would. But what concerns me is this: We’ve been running the board this way for more than six years. To implement threading, I would have to give our readers a new option of replying to an individual response, as opposed to the current single option of replying to the parent message.

Given that this is not a tech-savvy audience, I fear that I risk confusing, perhaps alienating, a significant number of long-time readers by implementing such a fundamental change to the functionality of the board.

Does anyone have some experience, some data, about implementing a flat-to-threaded switch on a non-techie discussion board? If so, I’d love to hear of it. I don’t want to burn our readers with another unwelcomed system change again.

Blogs have the advantage of using captchas and comment moderation with delayed posting, and users are getting pretty much adjusted to that.

I will be quoting some of this and linking to it.

Thanks for sharing!