The comment sections & citizen journalism: Listening to your audience

How do you balance staying connected to your audience with the amount of hateful rhetoric that flows out of comment boxes?

Following the Aurora, Colorado shooting in a movie theatre on July 10, 2012, reporters who work on CNN’s Belief Blog asked “Where was God in Aurora?” in the middle of that violent act.

This question triggered an incredible amount of comments (2,000 in six hours and 10,000 in total), who added their thoughts to how religion and faith plays into daily news. From this engagement with a simple question, a story was generated using reader’s comments to show how varied people’s thoughts were on the topic. This spurred to having religious scholars and leaders comment further in a separate story.

This was audience engagement done well.

“It showed how journalists can create community by actively involving the audience in the stories they cover,” (Batsell, 2015, p. 43).

Tragic events of this scale do not happen in small communities across the country every day, so what is the key when the most exciting event of the week is a new bylaw? It’s all about listening. Be it listening to the conversations about that bylaw, or maybe there’s something else, but it’s keeping a pulse on the topics that matter.

One way is to do this is through looking at the comments section attached to stories. Some media organizations have even decided to put comments right in the margins of stories where they felt compelled to write.

Despite a media organization’s strong desire to stay connected to a community, the comments section can be filled with messages of hate and trolls who love to create controversy where none existed. Or what’s worse, it may be a wealth of information that has nothing to do with the original story.

So where do you draw the line? Christian Science Monitor decided to have the default option with comments turned off because of the amount of time it took for reporters to filter feedback, engage with the audience and keep it tidy. They took two years to come to this decision after monitoring what was being submitted.

Online editor Dave Scott said the decision was business related. “We’d rather have a reporter write another story than spend half a day or a day engaging in discussions with a reader. A new story can reach a much larger audience,” (Batsell, 2015, p. 69).

As newsrooms become smaller with fewer people covering more beats, Digital First Media’s Steve Buttry said journalists must choose what they want to do the least effectively. If they can answer this challenging question in their list of daily priorities, it can make their life a lot easier.

While there may be a lot of vitriol you have to sift through, Alison Gow, editor of the Daily Post in South Wales said having someone in the newsroom advocating on behalf of the audience is very important for deciding how a newsroom covers a story.

Gow prefers someone “coming at it from a completely different perspective and quite possibly saying, ‘that story that you think is so great is actually repelling people,” (Batsell, 2015, p. 77).

Other journalists see more discussions and news tips happening through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or other social media platforms. They are connected and responding to reader’s comments on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.

All this engagement is nice, but the real question is, is it providing any return on investment? It has a lot to do with the amount of available resources and how you use them appropriately.

Compared to the old school style of journalism that again was very top down or media empire-centric, social media allows a discussion to occur where one never existed before. It’s like a virtual coffee shop that identifies what is on the reader’s minds.

“Think of social media and put it in other social contexts – at a party, or a circle of friends in high school, or whatever. The person who’s always talking about themselves is not a popular person,” said Buttry.

Another engagement strategy is to get readers to submit photos of an important aspect of the community. It could be a harvest moon photo gallery, it could be photos from the farmers market or it could be the annual fair.

So on those days when reader’s comments are not generating new ideas or are strong enough to publish in another story, reaching out through other creative outlets still shows that a media organization is listening and respecting the voice of its audience.

Journalists must understand the important value in listening to what the readers want to know about.

Think of also how readers were put to use trying to find the remnants of the missing Malaysia airline through analyzing pixels of satellite imagery saving incredible amounts of time.

In The Death and Life of American Journalism, McChesney and Nichols welcome “citizen journalism.” They believe that pro-am or crowd sourcing journalism, if done right and under the watchful eye of an editor, can create some incredible opportunities to free up time to cover other stories or tackle beats even deeper.

“The immense labour power unleashed by “pro-am” journalism makes it possible to analyze huge amounts of research in a short period of time” (McChesney and Nichols, 2010, p. 78).

While I hate to admit it because of its incredible opportunity to get information wrong by one editor who chooses to post false entries, Wikipedia is all about the incredible potential of online collaboration that has the opportunity to be done really well if it is monitored properly.

Josh Marshall, editor of American Prospect thinks that community journalism is all about bringing more voices to the table that were never invited before.”

“The more voices you have, the more takes of the news, you’re just going to have a more vibrant and diverse news ecosystem – as opposed to having two or three gatekeepers that control the news,” (McChesney and Nichols, 2010, p. 93).

In Geeks Bearing Gifts, Jeff Jarvis speaks about valued membership acting as a two way street with a news site, where readers and even tribes who follow different topics, actually get the opportunity to shape what and how an event is being covered.

“The community already exists and the news organization is just another member of it, contributing value to receive value,” (Jarvis, 2014, p. 44).

Depending on what your news organization’s mandate is, one thing is clear, our audience is online and we can’t ignore them anymore.