The New York Times magazine arrives on doorsteps this morning featuring The Trolls Among Us. Penned by Mattathias Schwartz, a staff writer for Good magazine, it is an excellent peek into the lives and morality of the people whose comments you probably hate the most.
You have to realize that anonymity on the internet is a joke.
Trolls, as they are known, are some of the most formidable problems that newspapers face in their attempts to engage with community. The LA Times‘ ill-fated editorial wiki serves as an excellent example of a public space thoroughly hijacked (and subsequently shut down).
How do you beat the trolls?
First, you have to recognize that trolls can be divided into two categories: Those who are only willing to harass anonymously, and those who will happily continue trolling with their identities attached. You will only ever be able to get rid of the first kind.
The Wall Street Journal has an article today chronicling the difficulty that newspapers are experiencing as they try to capture the local ad market for their web pages.
The problem is twofold:
Local advertisers don’t think of newspapers as a place for cheap, online ads
Newspapers are trying to sell these ads with ad sales teams
The chart from the article, which I’ve shamelessly ganked and placed here in this post, tells the tale: over the past two years, literally everyone has become familiar with AdSense and abandoned the newspaper. After all, AdSense is the self-serve ad platform for the little guy.
Google only has ad sales teams for the big clients, the ones dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars (or making hundreds of thousands of dollars), and lets everyone else take care of themselves.
Or, How To Win That Argument With The Managing Editor.
This list is a collaborative work! Send me your contributions by email, comment, or Twitter, and I’ll ad ‘em to the post.
Jay Rosen, who I follow on Twitter, got me thinking about newsroom curmudgeons with histweets last week. It got me to suggest that we compile a giant, handy-dandy guide to these curmudgeonly views and their counterpoints.
This is that guide.
And so, without further ado, here the is the ultimate guide to newspaper curmudgeon talking points:
1: “Comments are worthless vitriol and they degrade the work of journalists.”
This can be a tough one. It doesn’t take long to find a comment thread gone awry on a newspaper’s web site. Unfortunately for the curmudgeon, there is a wealth of evidence to prove them wrong.
The catch? These counter-point comments are often found on well moderated blogs that aren’t at major newspapers. Which leads to curmudgeon point…
I really like the way that the New York Times has a “comments of the moment” section high up in the sidebar on their blogs. It looks like this:
Lending high-profile exposure to good comments is one great “carrot” method of hosting a good comment section. Leading by example and rewarding good behavior are powerful, Pavlovian methods, and it proves that you’re taking community input seriously.
I know, I know, you “don’t have the resources.” Remember, you’re in startup mode. Time to invest.
Patrick Thornton of BeatBlogging.org has a good interview up with Mónica Guzmán, one of the three speakers that will be kick-starting The Pitch this September.
The main issue? Comments:
For Monica Guzman, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s first online reporter, empowering people is a major way to cultivate comments and build a community. She runs The Big Blog, a blog dedicated to keeping tabs on what’s happening in Seattle and the Seattle blogosphere.
“I’m convinced that newspapers need to rise up and take responsibility not just for the quality of the news, but for the quality of the conversation,” Guzman said.
This week’s On The Media programming includes three segments on reader comments, a topic that Gawker seems to have successfully brought to the front of everyone’s mind.
As usual, there are some good ideas and some bad ideas mixed into the whole. I’ve embedded the audio from each segment here (on NPR’s part, allowing this is a good idea) and left my thoughts below.
Comments on comments
The good part of this interview comes in at the very last question, so once the segment has loaded you should skip in to 5:26.
Ira Glass (host of This American Life) takes this opportunity to defend the idea of comments in particular, and a two-way conversation system in particular.
It’s called The Pitch because it is designed to start a discussion around one particular statement (or pitch) about current changes in the publishing industry.
For this event, that statement is:
There is no business model that will support a print daily product.
Apparently I’m being lazy today, and sending you elsewhere to do your reading. Here’s what else I think you should check out:
The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry - The premise is completely bonkers: Hedges argues that the newspaper industry is failing because the newspaper industry is failing, and we’re screwed because the newspaper industry is failing. Despite this, he makes one or two good points, like the problem inherent in letting people read only the news they choose to read.
A cure for curmudgeons - Jeff Jarvis vents his frustration with curmudgeons, and rightly so. Curmudgeons in charge are, in fact, the main reason for newspaper failure that Hedges so carefully avoids (probably because that wouldn’t make a very effective argument for saving the curmudgeons).
Yesterday’s post about self-defeating newsroom mentality is an absolute must read. It points out, more eloquently than I could, how important it is to foster the right attitude in a newsroom.
In a stable industry, there are often good reasons to pay a lot of attention to seniority and experience. “I’ve seen it before,” is a really reliable metric.
The problem with that metric is that it goes right out the window when you have a shift in your business, like the one that is currently happening, with such monumental consequences.
Right now, a system designed to suppress new ideas will kill you. But you don’t need to hear it from me. Go read the interview.
Last week Eric Schmidt spoke with the LA Times (found via editorsweblog) about the recent deal that Google has made with Lionsgate, and also about how newspapers were going to have more trouble adapting to the internet than video.
There are three things about this interview that I want to highlight:
1. The reason that Schmidt thinks video is OK and print is not is not just the split between entertainment and news (as he implies). The reason is that there’s currently no good way to track print content to its original source the way video can be tracked.
YouTube can pay Lionsgate because it knows which videos are Lionsgate property, regardless of where they’re being played.
2. One of the major shifts that I think might have to happen for newspapers to start seeing real online revenue is tied directly to Google’s self-admitted “moral obligation” to help print publisher’s out: it needs to help publishers protect copyright in the only way that matters — revenue.
Some of you may have noticed the new tab that appeared in the top corner of this blog a week or so ago. It says “
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry.