The Evolving Newsroom

UK blogger Martin Belam has been running a series on making the most of comments on blogs. It's quite wide-ranging and I'm finding it useful (especially in reinforcing my intention to move on from Blogger at some stage to a platform with more functionality).

In this post he talks about how to engage with people commenting on blogs:

"If people have taken the time to leave comments on your blog, then join in as
well... If people ask you a question, take the time answer it.

"Increasingly publishing platforms enable bloggers to set up a different look and feel for comments left by the author of a post. I'm a fan of this idea, as I think it helps to highlight when an author is engaged with the audience response to the content they are publishing.

"You've much more chance of getting an answer and continuing a conversation if
you also approach the person directly. If the person has left an email address
alongside their comment, I will also take the time to drop them a short polite
email."

He also looks at moderation, using RSS for comments, using comments to manage complaints and more. Worth a read if, like me, you're a relative newcomer to blogging and want to develop a more conversational style.

The Guardian is increasing community content as part of the ongoing redesign of its website, working closely with social media company Pluck, according to journalism.co.uk.

"A new community area is planned for later this year which will aim to identify the 'most useful' members of the Guardian's community of readers and develop a means of asking them questions and gauging their opinions on specific topics, director of digital content Emily Bell told the audience at the Guardian's Changing Media Summit."

"The focus on user-interaction has been strengthened by the success of the arts, sports and Comment is Free sections of the site, Bell added, which have shown a 100 per cent year-on-year growth in page impressions and unique users since adding commenting facilities for readers."

Interesting that the focus for the new community area appears to be picking the brains of the 'most useful' members of the community rather than, say, extending the community and letting readers blog as telegraph.co.uk and The Sun have done.

The beatbloggers talked to Ed Sussman at FastCompany.com about how they went about developing a robust community on their site (using Drupal). FastCompany is a business magazine that looks at innovation, technology, management, leadership, social responsibility and worklife balance.

FastCompany members have the opportunity to blog on the site, ask questions, answer questions, suggest questions and suggest stories, as well as more usual elements such as voting in polls and commenting on stories.

Unusually, their contributions appear on the homepage alongside stories and blogs written by journalists and experts. I've never seen journalism and community so closely entwined before.

The interview is an interesting read with some good advice in it. The piece opens with this quote:

"When editors are going to assign a story we typically think about different elements that go into it; who is the writer, who is the photographer, do we want a video or a podcast or any kind of poll? Now we ask an additional question: what is the community aspect?"

On how journalists' job change:

"For some it doesn't change at all, for others it changes a lot. There are some people who are long-form feature writers, who will remain long form feature writers. They are not going to be moderating groups, but they will probably answer a lot of questions and messages about the stories they write and engage in more personal conversations.

"Some of our journalists, like Charles Fishman, write six or seven features a year and turn out a book every year and a half. Thats still what he is going to do - but he will engage with our audience in a much more direct way.

"Other people have totally new jobs: The senior editor at the website became senior editor / community director. She is in there answering as many questions as she can that need to be answered. She is working full time with the community."

On members microblogging:

"I call it a microblog because it's not just an answer to a question, you can click on their profile and anything they answer whether it's a question or a comment or a blog post. If all they do is answer a couple 'fast talk' questions a month, in essence, they are blogging in a guided way, answering questions which our journalists are posing to the community.

"In fact, you can subscribe to their feed externally or internally, so you can follow all the content on our site. There are people already who are answering every single question and they seem to like that a lot more than blogging. I also like the fact that our editors are in there mixing it up with them."

I posted the other day about Radio NZ adding news feeds on Twitter, which I think is a great move. There are quite a few US and UK news feeds available, but as far as I'm aware RNZ is the only New Zealand news organisation providing feeds to the Twitterati. So well done them.

But they deserve a mention for more than that. I noted a couple of kinks in the service and decided to email them my thoughts using the contact email they provide on the website. Their webmaster replied with a friendly, detailed email two days later (it was a weekend after all.) Spot on. Now there's someone who understands customer service and the value of community.

Community, like it or not, is the future. Digital citizens are not happy just looking at your news website and using your services in a static way. They want to be able to engage. To tell you what they think of your service, to make suggestions (which are sometimes very good), to talk to each other about news stories (and your service). If you don't give them the chance to engage, they'll give up on you eventually and go somewhere else. These ideas are well articulated in a couple of books I've read recently, if you're interested: The Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics. The Wisdom of Crowds also comes highly recommended.

The kinks I mentioned in my previous post were that you seem to get the same stories repeated across the day, which gets a bit tiresome and clogs up your Twitterbox.

RNZ explained that the stories are only repeated when there has been an update, although the headline may not have been rewritten. They plan on improving the system to amend this, and another issue related to linking back to stories from Twitter, but there's a bit of work involved:

"The current publishing software was designed to meet our needs when we built the site 3 years ago. But the software interface between our newsroom system and the website CMS was written in-house (in Perl), so we can easily change the way it works to create a 'publish stories once' news feed. There are some other non-trivial changes we'd have to make within the CMS to accommodate this and also ensure that urls to updated stories remained the same over the life of a story."

Glad to know there's a will and a way. Other news organisations should take a leaf out of RNZ's book: engaging with your audience works. I had a quibble, RNZ made it possible for me to get in touch with them, I did, they explained the situation, I'm happy with the explanation and remain a happy customer. Simple, really.

Peter Horrocks, head of BBC newsroom, posts a speech he made at the University of Leeds' Institute of Communication Studies about where user generated content fits in at the BBC. The BBC is restructuring its newsroom with the UGC team sitting alongside the news teams supplying content for broadcast and web outlets - there's more detail in the post.

Peter covers a lot of issues including how much weight to give to user comments, how many resources to commit to managing them, not letting the 1% of the audience who comment drive the news agenda, how to find the wheat within the chaff that will turn into compelling stories and how to apply journalistic principles to the process.

"We cannot just take the views that we receive via e-mails and texts and let them dictate our agenda. Nor should they give us a slant around which we should orient our take on a story. At their best they are an invaluable information resource and an important corrective to group-think. They very often ask direct or apparently naïve questions that get to the heart of the subject – they can be gold dust for interviewers for instance.

"But we need to be very clear about how many contributions we get, their statistical significance and the weight we should attach to them. The BBC gets an average of 10,000 e-mails or posts in a day to its Have Your Say site. That can soar on big news days. That sounds an enormous number. But up to 5 million people can come to the BBC News website on a single day. That means that fewer than 1% of our users, even on the most active days, are choosing to say something to us. What organisation – a political party, a business, a trades union – would allow its stance to be totally driven by such a small minority?

"Of course a small proportion could be indicative of a wider population, but we can’t be sure. Rather than playing a numbers game to drive our agenda I instead encourage our teams to look for thoughtful or surprising views and opinions. In other words we still need to be journalistic with this material, as we would with any other source."

It's a considered piece and I recommend reading it. The comments add a lot too.

Pluck is to supply community tools to Guardian website. This from Press Gazette.