Community

Social media: One-to-some communication that needs amplifiers

Published by on February 22, 2012 | 1 Response

Ethan Zuckerman had a great insight yesterday at the Knight Foundation event looking at the information needs of communities. [blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/andrewhaeg/status/172021672419926016"] Ethan pointed to the coverage of Tunisia and how the video of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation was uploaded to Facebook, one of the few such sites still accessible in Tunisia. Exiled Tunisian Sami ben Garbia covered the early stages of the… Read more →

Pseudonymous commenters aren’t so bad after all

Published by on January 13, 2012 | 6 Responses

Disqus has released an infographic of some analysis they’ve done on their comments to compare pseudonymous, eponymous (real name) and anonymous commenters. They looked at both quantity and quality and found that pseudonymous commenters are better for a community than either eponymous or anonymous commenters. To save you from having to wade through a rather pointless infographic, here are the… Read more →

Standards in journalism (and comments)

Published by on April 20, 2011 | 1 Response

Via Kevin, I came across this piece by James Fallows of The Atlantic: Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media. As soon as I saw that headline, my feathers ruffled. So you think new media is worse than traditional media eh? Well, how come debates that pit blogs against journalism never talk of the scum-sucking pond-dwelling tabs, eh? How… Read more →

Journalists must set the tone for their communities

Published by on March 29, 2011 | 1 Response

Robert Niles has a must-read post on the Online Journalism Review about the role that journalists should play in terms of interactivity and community on their sites. Online communities need leadership: Will journalists provide it, or will someone else? he writes: …writing in any interactive environment is an act of leadership. Your words, your tone and your style not only… Read more →

Comments as a premium service?

Published by on February 2, 2011 | 3 Responses

I’m often asked what are the metrics for success when it comes to blogging or community engagement on a website, and I always respond that it isn’t simply the number of comments. Chasing high comment counts can be a race to the bottom in terms of content as the most provocative content easily gets the most comments creating more of… Read more →

Journalism: Opening up the ‘insider’s game’

Published by on November 26, 2010 | 4 Responses

I met Jonathan Stray this past summer when I was speaking at Oxford, and I’ve really enjoyed keeping up with him on Twitter and on his blog. He’s smart, and if you’re thinking about journalism in new ways and thinking of how we can, as Josh Benton puts it, change the grammar of journalism, then you definitely want to add… Read more →

TBD: Hunting for a new business model for regional news

Published by on November 17, 2010 | 3 Responses

From right to left, Steve Buttry, Erik Wemple and Jim Brady of TBD at the recent Online News Association Conference in Washington One of the areas that I’ve been watching closely has been the effort to rebuild the business model to support local and regional and regional journalism, and this week I wrote a brief profile for the Media Guardian… Read more →

Sky News got the argument it wanted

Published by on November 4, 2010 | 1 Response

Last week, Sky News announced the closure of its discussion forums. Simon Bucks, Sky News Online’s associate editor, wrote: We did this after a lot of thought and consideration. Although the boards were very popular, a small number of people had hijacked them and reduced the level of debate to meaningless abuse. He continued: At Sky News we welcome robust debate… Read more →

Making it easier to climb the ladder of participation

Published by on October 21, 2010 | 1 Response

There is no such thing as a perfect participation platform when it comes to building engagement around news and other content. Too often we try to outsource to technology what are really social functions that have to be done by human beings. In terms of social media journalism, the best examples come from journalists actively engaging with people to involve… Read more →

Evolution of comments needed

Published by on October 12, 2010 | 5 Responses

Amidst all of the brouhaha of the latest instalment of bloggers versus journalists, George Brock, the head of journalism at City University, hits on something that is important: Comments on news sites need to evolve. They’re rarely rewarding, many comments overlap, the sequence is incoherent and quantity of rewarding reads very low. This isn’t to say that comments and user… Read more →