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.
As a guy with a background in social media, I have a bias in saying this, but: One of the reasons newspapers have such a tough time with comments while bloggers, even the popular ones, have relatively good experiences is the mindset that Ira identifies in his answer.
Even our terminology is inherently slanted against the comment. Calling it hoisting and using phrases like “above the fray” suggest, sometimes accurately, that comments reside in the gutters and back alleys of the web, and are not suitable for tourists or broad daylight.
If comments are treated as a gimmick by the paper, then they will be treated as a gimmick by the readers as well.
Hellhounds on my Tail
I agree with Lee Siegel that newspapers and magazines should allow reporters to comment in the threads attached to their work (hell, they should be encouraged to do it).
But I wholeheartedly disagree with his opinion that comments are entirely a blight on the internet. The assumption that no reader has anything worthwhile to say is to a certain extent a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the proverbial baby in the bathwater, you must be careful not to throw out the good with the bad.
Aren’t We There Yet?
What I found particularly interesting in this interview was how the Roanoke Times outsourced their comment moderation to Legacy.com, a service intended for Obituaries. The larger realization being, of course, that comment systems and comment management can be outsourced.
If you don’t want to hire the staff and put in the development time to build a great comment system, it might work to simply outsource the moderation and set your reporters loose on the site.
Carole Tarrant also dances with the issue of anonymity in comments, which I think is appropriate in some cases and not in others. If you take Facebook and MySpace as examples, it’s easy to see how providing an environment where 99% of the participants in a community are tied to their real identity can act as a powerful moderating force.
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