'Contributing Writers' instead of 'Citizen Journalists' add to the conversation at the Bakersfield Californian

February 1, 2006 By Leave a Comment

I had the chance to ask Ray Hacke, Citizen Journalism Editor at The Bakersfield Californian, some questions about their relatively new Your Words project.

From the post:

I like the fact you used the term ‘contributing writer’ – did you consciously stay away from the citizen journalist term? If so, why?

Actually, we did choose to stay away from the term “citizen journalism.” The reason was that we wanted average readers – people who have little to no writing experience whatsoever – to feel like they could have a voice in our paper, too. The word “journalist” has some heavy connotations to it – we felt people might hear it and think they’d have to have some formal training or be thoroughly knowledgeable about grammar, spelling, style, etc., to write for us. We figured that might scare them off, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Our overriding mantra for citizen journalism is, “Journalism is a conversation,” and we want people from all walks of life to sit down at the table and join in. So far, we’ve actually been pretty successful in that regard — we’ve gotten contributions from writers as young as 12 and as old as 90, from janitors as well as doctors.

Filed Under: People

Scoring a goal with niche content online

December 1, 2005 By 2 Comments

You wouldn’t think a national sports league would need the help of a community journalism website to thrive. But a niche network of fans of U.S. soccer have taken it upon themselves to cover and help promote the sport, which has long been neglected by the mainstream media.

MatchNight caters to U.S. professional soccer fans — and features their writing, reporting, photos and audio recordings. In an e-mail interview, Lee Smith, MatchNight’s founder and publisher, said the site was started in 2001 to give fans more coverage than they could get in their sports pages.

“At that time, and still much so today, sports sections and highlight shows are filled with baseball, basketball and American football,” writes Smith. “Soccer coverage was often limited to who scored and who won. And many times, when soccer was mentioned, it was a match from overseas.”

Publishing online gives Smith the opportunity to reach to a small but national audience of fans — at low cost. The main site is complemented by 11 regional sites around the country in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. The site’s mission statement say it’s “for the fans, by the fans, and for the benefit and growth of professional soccer in the United States.”

MatchNight covers soccer stories that the traditional media ignores — like the draft, preseason training and specific players, according to Smith. At the same time, Smith says, the site’s writers try to give a sense of what it’s like to actually be at a match.

Volunteer reporters – quality and money issues

According to Smith, most of the reporting is done by volunteer writers, with a few paid feature columnists. The site occasionally pays freelancers if a volunteer writer or photographer can’t get to the scene, Smith writes.

Many of the site’s citizen reporters have some journalism education or sports writing experience, he says. And both Smith and managing editor Shane Murphy make clear they’re committed to quality journalism.

“Most of what I have been doing for MatchNight over the last year has been in ensuring that our stories meet the standards that our Editorial Board expects from our writers,” writes Murphy via e-mail. “Though we pride ourself on being coverage ‘by the fans, for the fans,’ it’s critical that we’re seen as reliable and ethical with every story that we publish. … We see the quality of our reporting as the cornerstone of our coverage.”

Smith says good journalism is key to the site’s success. But he says being an online-only publication makes it easier to dismiss MatchNight reporters — which means they have to work harder.

“We may not always be seen as equals by others in the press box or in the locker room, but our performance over the past five years has put most of our sources at ease in knowing we are going to make every effort to be fair, accurate and responsible with the access we’ve been granted,” writes Smith.

The site provides writers with AP stylebooks — and the volunteer reporters that do locker room interviews get digital audio recorders, says Smith. Those tools of the trade are one way of paying volunteers, but, Smith says, “Our writers are paid in the form of bandwidth, site coding, technical support and whatever advertising they sell on their own regional sites.”

Nonetheless, Smith acknowledges that cash payment to writers may ultimately benefit the site.

“[T]o maintain and improve our quality, we need to offer some form of cash payment — no matter how small — in the future,” he writes. “The problem with volunteers is a lack of consistency. When people get paid, they tend to take the responsibility seriously and are more apt to meet deadlines.”

The site isn’t profitable yet, but Smith notes they’re close to breaking even. Users can currently access all the content on the site for free, but Smith says there’s occasionally talk in the industry about whether advertising alone could support such a narrow niche nationally online.

Smith says most advertisers — other than poker and gambling sites — aren’t looking for the kind of audience MatchNight presents. The site has about 100,000 readers per month, but they’re spread across the nation, Smith says.

“Many advertisers seem to either want a broad audience nationally or want a local audience. Some of our regional sites have been more successful in selling local advertising that MatchNight has nationally,” writes Smith.

According to the site’s advertising page, the content attracts an average of 80,000 unique visitors and 350,000 pageviews per month. They don’t mention who tracks the information for them, but they do say that it’s third party and done offsite. Advertisers are able to purchase ads via CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPC (cost per click).

Reviewing MatchNight

Beyond just the stories and columns, MatchNight has some great soccer data compiled for their users, content that is difficult (if not impossible) to find elsewhere online. One such section is the MLS SuperDraft 2004 Results. As well as basic data on each player picked up in the different rounds of the draft, the section has links to profiles of the individual players. The site makes it easy to follow individual teams as well.

In addition to the draft information, they have a lot of content about the U.S. Open Cup, the Brimstone Cup, the Champion’s Cup, and … well, you get the idea. The content goes pretty deep.

Clicking through to one of the regional sites, users are greeted with a message that the site is run by “official MatchNight News Correspondents.” The sites’ different header images give them a little distinct bit of personality, but having the same navigation helps with a sense of continuity.

Design-wise, the main site utilizes a lot of Flash, keeping with MatchNight’s emphasis on multimedia. The sites in the network have an impressive display of soccer photos. They also have their hands in audio, having forayed into podcasting in January.

The photo gallery holds the work of 11 photographers. Users can select their favorite pictures and bookmark them. (You don’t have to register when using this feature, so it must be cookie-based, much like the MyPI service that recently launched.) Naturally, some shots on MatchNight are better than others. But you have to keep in mind that some of these images are the only look you’ll get of the action. Tony Biscaia is photo editor for the network and also contributes a lot.

MatchNight does have forums and a blog, which the site describes as containing “unverified/developing stories, rumor, and news reported elsewhere.” Only the main site has a blog — the regional ones do not. Smith mentioned the site has experienced problems on their forums (who hasn’t?), and they do have some measures in place on the blog to stop comment spam. Smith says the blog and the forums aren’t a major focus of the site because of the need for constant moderation.

“There always seems to be two or three in every topic that spoil the discussion for everyone. Problem is: it’s not always the same two or three,” Smith writes.

When someone says that forums and blogs aren’t a big part of their community-based site, you have to wonder, especially if their mission statement includes the phrase “by the fans, for the fans.” But MatchNight’s commitment to good journalism is apparently its motivating force here.

“We shut down the message boards because we felt that the lack of rules and ethics shown there negatively impacted our readers,” writes Shane Murphy. “That’s why Lee started MatchNight in the first place — to be a haven for serious soccer fans to get real news and information from informed sources.”

For U.S. Soccer fans — and online publishers — the future is bright. Sites like MatchNight are what we need to see more of in online community journalism. Yes, the site does try some cutting edge technology here and there, but it’s not chasing the bleeding edge. Instead, MatchNight’s publisher and editors are trying to heed the basic tenets of journalism, and for that I applaud them.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , ,

Online communities: Growing an Internet garden

June 23, 2005 By 2 Comments

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

Filed Under: Editing Tagged With: