Comments aren’t engagement, transparency or community
When I was blogs editor at The Guardian, Sewell Chan of the New York Times paid me a visit. He was working on setting up The City Room, the Times city blog. I don’t remember exactly how he phrased the question, but he wanted to know how I defined blogging.
On the fly, in a conversation I was quite enjoying, I drew a distinction between standard journalism and blogging that I had never made before. In journalism, you go out and gather facts, and you tie those facts, the threads of the story, together as neatly, engagingly and efficiently as possible. But blogging was more than just a platform, it was an entirely different editorial approach. As a journalist, I could use those same threads of reporting and tease them out into a debate or a discussion. The focus was engagement rather than simply conveying information.
Blogging can be a lot of different things, but for news organisations, it was about the editorial approach, not the publishing platform. When I first started blogging as a journalist in 2004 for the BBC, we didn’t have a blogging platform, just our own in-house CMS, which wasn’t set up for blogging in any way, including the ability to publish comments. However, as my editors said at the time, it was the internet pace of publishing and my engagement with readers that set the project apart.
Fast forward to the present and social media has changed as has legacy media. The most recent big development was Reuters’ decision to shut off comments on its news stories while keeping them on blog posts. Reuters has come in for quite a lot of criticism for it, and much of that criticism seems to be that the news organisation is shutting itself off from the wisdom of the crowds, that it will become less transparent and that it is ceding the value of community to Twitter and Facebook.
I can understand why Reuters would make a strategic decision to have comments focused on engagement features like blogging. While there is a value to comments in terms of increasing time on site and a loyal audience for news articles, managing comments and engagement takes staff time. At The Guardian, when we launched comments on news stories we realised that all not all content required or would be enhanced by comments. Besides, we didn’t have the resources to manage comments on every piece of content.
At the two newspapers where I’m now executive editor, we don’t have open comments on local crime articles. It brought out the worst in people, and in some of our smaller tight-knit communities, I was worried that the online comments would break out into real-world violence.
I understand and agree that audience often has something to add. Like Dan Gillmor in his seminal book We the Media, I realised long ago that there are people in my audience who know more than I do, especially on specialist topics, but that doesn’t necessarily require comments. For years at the BBC, we had a very elegant way of handling reader input, insight or first-person eye witness accounts versus opinion or points of view. For stories in which we wanted first-person accounts or eye witness pictures, we added an email address and mobile phone number at the bottom of the story. (A couple of very basic Nokia mobile phones admirably handled the flood of text and MMS messages for years.)
Later we launched blogs and later still, the Have Your Say platform for industrial scale vox pops. For first-person accounts and images, the email address and mobile number were promoted online and on-air, and it made it very clear that we welcomed our audience to become part of the journalism process. These social solutions were bounded by the technology of the day, but we deployed them with a strategic elegance that neatly segmented the kind of interaction we wanted: Eye witness accounts and points of view. With the technology these days, I’d put more effort in having some drop dead easy to use our mobile apps or feature in our apps for reporting than a comment box.
Another argument for ubiquitous comments is transparency and accountability. Again, transparency is an editorial value, not a technical feature, and we express our goal to be transparent and to be held accountable in a number of ways. As my papers, I absolutely want and invite comments for the Letters from the Editor I write; our reporters have their email addresses on every story; and I am active on social media and so are most of my staff. Shortly, I’m going to begin editor’s hours at local libraries, coffee shops and other public places. Smart socially native journalists have always known that off-line community and online community are symbiotic.
But transparency is as much about our communications as it is being open to criticisms from our readers. It includes being open about our editorial policies and comment policies — discussions I have used Facebook to have with our community — as well as publishing and appropriately responding to critical comments. I am often on our Facebook page, inviting comment and contribution and responding to criticism, and I am the executive editor, not the social media editor. I want to make a statement that we’re digital, open and accountable.
The last criticism of Reuters is that they are ceding community and engagement to Twitter and Facebook. I can understand that, and I have said that we need to understand our co-opetive relationship with social platforms. Our audience uses these platforms to share and comment on our content and other events in our communities. That drives traffic and attention to us, but we also compete with Twitter and Facebook in monetising attention.
That being said, comments do not make a community. They can help, but again, it’s about the editorial approach. Community takes a comprehensive social strategy, not just a comment box on the bottom of articles.
At the end of the day, I’ll repeat something I said on Twitter: I wish that news organisations did a tenth of the engagement-focused features one hundred percent better than we do. The bottom line: Don’t confuse comments, a technical feature and a tactic, for a strategy linked to key editorial and business goals.
In these days of scarce resources, we need to make strategic decisions that increase engagement and loyalty. Arguing that we need a comment box on every piece of content feels very last decade to me. At legacy media companies, our social media strategies have grown up, our staffs are more socially native and we know that our success in engagement will be driven by more than a single technical feature. We have to do more than tick the comments box.
