The Evolving Newsroom

The prospect of (some) journalists becoming community managers over time continues to appeal to and intrigue me.

By that I mean journalists opening up the news gathering, reporting and analysis process to readers, allowing communities to develop around areas of interest - enabling people with expertise and views to contribute material for news stories on, say, how health is administered in the Waikato, or pest management in the Waitakere ranges. The journalist becomes a community manager as well as news gatherer and news writer.

Building communities, however, doesn't necessarily come easy. There are plenty of examples of companies that have started intranets which failed to inspire users; wikis introduced into classrooms that never got used. iYomu, a New Zealand based social network, failed to gain traction despite considerable resources. This StartUp article looks at iYomu's demise and at what makes another local example, Geekzone, successful.

So what of news communities? I like keeping an eye on the beat bloggers, a group of US journalists experimenting with using blogs and other social web2.0 tools to develop their beats, to see what they're learning along the way.

And I've just read a useful passage in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. In a chapter looking at wikis, and particularly at why Wikipedia works as well as it does, he says that people have to care about the content to want to edit it.

Wikis provide ways for groups to work together, and to defend the output of that work [against vandals], but these capabilities are available only when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes. When they are not, creating a wiki can be an exercise in futility, if not an outright disaster.

One notable example was the Los Angeles Times 'Wikitorial' effot, in which the content of the paper's editorial pages was made available to the public. The Times announced the experiment in a bid to drive users there, and drive them they did.

A group of passionate and committed users quickly arrived and set about destroying the experiment, vandalising the posted editorials with off-topic content and porn. The Wikitorial had been up for less than forty-eight hours when a Times staffer was told to simply pull the plug.

The problem the Times suffered from was simple: no one cared enough about the contents of the Wikitorial to defend it, much less improve it.

An editorial is meant to be a timely utterance of a single opinionated voice - the opposite of the characteristics that make for good wiki content.

A wiki augments community rather than replacing it; a wiki will suffer form the Tragedy of the Commons, as the Wikitorial did, as individuals use it as an attention-getting platform, and there is no community to defend it.

There's a community development workshop running at Webstock in Wellington next February which I've signed up for - not because I'm managing a community or am likely to in the immediate future, but because it's hard to see how I can go on being involved in news and journalism education without understanding more about how successful communities work. I'm looking forward to it.

Food for thought from BusinessWeek, a US publication experimenting with involving readers in magazine issues from conception through publication and subsequent debate. Thanks to Nat Torkington for the link.

"[The idea] is to reinvent journalism as a process that involves the reader in the front end, to advocate story ideas; in the middle, to inform the reporting of a story; and in the end, to expand on the conversation a story creates. That latter conversation is not a letter-to-the-editor monologue, but rather a dialogue between the professional writers and the audience."

In a post that I found well worth the read, executive editor John A Byrne expands on the background and concept:

"In the early 1960s, Tom Wolfe and other talented writers created the New Journalism. It cleverly deployed the techniques of great fiction to news and feature writing. Today's direct engagement with readers is the antithesis of Mr. Wolfe's self-centered narrative inventions. Call it the "New" New Journalism.

"It fully embraces its readers, treats their opinions and beliefs with respect and dignity, and leverages the intelligence of the crowd to create a more valuable outcome for all. It recognizes that content is no longer king; Context is. In a world of commoditization, where too much news and opinion already chases too few eyeballs, this new loyalty-inducing journalism builds community and relationships."

BusinessWeek published a user-generated issue, called Trouble at the Office, which posed considerable challenges including...

• The "New" New Journalism takes work, a lot more work than traditional writing and editing.
• Soliciting participation was hard; vetting and structuring it was even harder.
  
• It was tough to get the flow going. Readers are busy people doing other things – that is, things other than reporting, thinking deeply about a narrow subject, and writing cogently about it.
  
• We should have started earlier and seeded discussions with our own provocative essays, podcasts, and videos to give people an idea of what we were looking for.
• A reader's ability to offer a smart, impassioned response to a problem... rarely translates into an ability to write a long-form piece.
  
• We had too many editors wanting to rewrite the voice out of the contributions. It's more important to preserve the readers' voice and the passion.
• Participatory journalism works best for subjects on which readers have authority. The workplace was a fertile area ... asking our readers to write on how to fix the subprime mess might not add much.

Byrne's closing comments, however, focus more squarely on the upside of building reader communities around news sites:

"We've learned that they are passionate, willing to share valuable thoughts and insights, generous with their effort and time. What's more, engaging users in the reinvention of our craft has led to the discovery that our readers are exactly like us: They share a common goal to improve life, not merely bringing issues and situations to light, but sharing and working toward common solutions. That is the true essence of community."

Hear hear.

I'm not aware of experiments like this in New Zealand, on mainstream news sites at any rate. Have you seen any?

Anyone writing a moderation policy for a news website - and there must be a few of you doing just that at the moment - might want to check out BoingBoing moderator Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Q&A on their moderation policy.

Moderation is the business of checking comments submitted by website users to make sure they're not defamatory, inciting hatred or racism, off topic or obscene. It's increasingly going to become part of everyday life in newsrooms as websites expand and community content - comments, user stories, images, blogs and so on - is beefed up.

The BoingBoing moderators' Q&A strikes me as a great example of writing clear guidelines in a way that works for your audience - light years ahead of those nasty legalese Terms and Conditions that some news sites are still using.

Not only did it make me laugh (always welcome on a Wednesday afternoon) but it taught me a lot without making it feel like I was learning anything.

Favourite new word: disemvowelling.

Q. All the vowels have disappeared from a paragraph I wrote! What's going on?

A. We did it. Someone (a moderator, one of the Boingers) was expressing displeasure at your remarks. The technique is called disemvowelling. It deprecates but does not delete the remark. With work, the disemvowelled text should still be readable.

Favourite quote of the day:

"Life is an unending series of auditions. Get used to it."

On why moderators are necessary:

Q. Why does Boing Boing have to have a moderator?

A. First answer: Because every general-interest online forum that's worth reading has some kind of moderation system in force.

Second answer: Because four years ago, Boing Boing's first, unmoderated comment system went so septic that it had to be shut down. The Boingers want to never go through that again.

On courtesy:

Q. I thought I was being reasonably polite when I got into an argument with Bonzo, but two of my comments got removed entirely, and he just had a couple of paragraphs disemvowelled. Why me? Why not him?

A. There are many possibilities. The biggest one is that you were insufficiently polite. In the heat of an argument, your own remarks are going to seem more justifiable, and Bonzo's arguments are going to seem shabbier and more malicious. This temporary distortion is best addressed by being more polite than you think should be necessary.

On people who comment only on how bored they are:

Q. It's obvious that you won't tolerate anything but supportive comments from brown-nosers and yes-men--right?

A. I'll venture a guess that you responded to a new entry on Boing Boing by announcing that it was hopelessly lame and boring, and then came back later to discover that your comment had disappeared.

Q. Yes! Why did you remove it?

A. This is another one of those questions that has multiple answers.

First: you didn't explain why it bored you. Without an explanation, announcing that you're bored is neither useful or entertaining. Also, it's a real bringdown for readers who lack confidence in their own opinions.

Second: because frequently the "I'm so bored" thing is just attitudinizing. There's a whole big internet out there, and it's full of people who, if they don't like what they're currently reading, move on and read something else. They don't post about how bored they are just to have something to say.

You may need different rules and tone than BoingBoing, of course, but it's not a bad starting point.