To Comment Or Not To Comment?
- 1. TO COMMENT OR NOT TO COMMENT? Talia Stroud Associate Professor, University ofTexas at Austin Director, Engaging News Project @engagingnews Marie K. Shanahan Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut @mariekshan
- 2. COMMENT SECTIONS:THE GOOD Examples culled from GateHouse Media organizations
- 5. ENGAGING NEWS PROJECT To provide research-based techniques for engaging online audiences in commercially viable and democratically beneficial ways.
- 6. Background Content of the Comments Designing the Commenting Space
- 7. COMMENT SECTIONS: THE STAKES FOR NEWSROOMS 1. Comments can affect what people think about your journalism 2. Incivility in the comments can affect what people take away from your journalism 3. Comments can build community 4. Comment sections can be a source of revenue
- 8. COMMENT SECTIONS: STATE OFTHE SPACE
- 9. Background Content of the Comments Designing the Commenting Space
- 10. GETTING INVOLVED IN COMMENT SECTIONS Journalistic Involvement: TwoViews Comments are the purview of the site users and newsroom staff should not respond … Diakopoulos & Naaman, 2011,Towards quality discourse in online news comments. The tone changes simply because the user realizes someone … is listening Jon DeNunzio, Washington Post
- 11. REPORTER INVOLVEMENT IN COMMENTS Design Partner with local news station Across 70 different political posts, we randomized whether: 1)Reporter engaged 2)Station engaged 3)No engagement Engagement was respectful, highlighting strong comments Results Reporter engagement … • Reduced incivility • Increased provision of evidence
- 12. REPORTER INVOLVEMENT IN COMMENTS Techniques to spark conversation and highlight productive comments: 1. Answer legitimate questions (e.g. “Good question Mandy…”) 2. Ask questions (e.g. “What are your thoughts on that?”) 3. Provide additional information (e.g. “Here’s a link to the bill text.”) 4. Encourage and highlight good discussion (e.g. “Tom, you bring up something interesting”)
- 13. TESTIMONIALS “I’ve had a really positive experience getting involved in the comments. It encourages me to look at the comments section more.The readers respond well when I go in and comment.They generally will thank me for my response.” -Jessica Parks, county reporter The Philadelphia Inquirer “(Engaging News Project) put out a study that showed that having writers moderate and comment on their own stories improved the tenor of comments overall. A handful of reporters for the Inquirer and Daily News have started to do this and anecdotally, we feel it’s been pretty successful.” -Erica Palan, audience engagement manager
- 14. SEEDINGTHE COMMENTS Research found: With 4 thoughtful comments and 1 unthoughtful comment, people left MORE thoughtful comments. With 1 thoughtful and 4 unthoughtful comments, people left LESS thoughtful comments. Sukumaran,A.,Vezich, S., McHugh, M., & Nass, C. (2011). Normative influences on thoughtful online participation. In Proceedings of the 2011 AnnualConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’11 (pp. 3401–3410). NewYork, NewYork, USA:ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1978942.1979450 Could we use this insight to think about how to get comment sections off on the right foot?
- 15. MODERATION Why moderate? 1. Demonstrates to commenters that someone is monitoring the space 2. Creates a better online community Why not moderate? 1. Time 2. Difficult to balance free speech and building a strong community 3. Lack of clarity on what action to take
- 16. WHATTO DO WITH PROBLEMATIC CONTENT? Delete the Comment Delete the Entire Comment Section Remove the User Example: SelectivelyTurn on Comments
- 17. Background Content of the Comments Designing the Commenting Space
- 18. DESIGNINGTHE SPACE Sukumaran,A.,Vezich, S., McHugh, M., & Nass, C. (2011). Normative influences on thoughtful online participation. In Proceedings of the 2011 AnnualConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’11 (pp. 3401–3410). NewYork, NewYork, USA:ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1978942.1979450 Unthoughtful Design Thoughtful Design (a)Visually casual and informal (b) captcha with 1 neutral word (e.g. magenta, curtain) and 3 low thoughtful words (e.g. sloppy) (c) Comment box label = Got something to say?? (d) Comment box default text = Have your say here! (a) Formal and serious appearance (b) Captcha with 1 neutral word and 3 thoughtful words (e.g. understanding) (c) Comment box label = "Please enrich the discussion by adding your comments" (d) Comment box default text = "Please try to make your contributions as constructive as possible" Research found: Thoughtful Design = More Thoughtful Comments