By
Kyle Stokes
The reputation of the comments section
as an “infamously troll-ridden Wild West of
abuse, ignorance and spam” is alive and well. Popular Science shut down its comment sections.
The Chicago Sun-Times did the same while it
revamps the section. Vox launched without a comments feature. Quartz and The Dish
haven’t bothered with them, either. Even YouTube is cracking
down on its commenters, some of whom have earned their reputations as the
biggest bullies of the internet’s schoolyard.
Yes, the worst comments are vile and
indefensible; yes, the meanest offenders add little to the public discourse.
“The easiest thing in the world for us to do would be to excise the comments
section … altogether,” wrote Matt Thompson on NPR’s Code
Switch blog this week. “But at its best, our comments section makes
our work better, our journalism stronger, and Code Switch more valuable for its
users.”
Hear, hear. Maybe in the near future
our sites will end up looking more like Quartz or Vox or PopSci‘s. We ought to
discard the few bad apples, of course, but we should take care not to throw out
the good ones along with them — because the good ones have something to teach
us. After all, through your comments section you might learn a few things:
Your audience will make its
expectations known
“Mr. Stokes?” commenter Mouse Rat asked me on the
education blog I wrote, StateImpact Indiana. “Can
you get anyone at the [Department of Education] to talk to you about their
decision-making process, to explain their actions during this mess?” By “this
mess,” the commenter is referring to a statewide crash in Indiana’s
standardized testing system — a story that impacted almost everyone in our core audiences. They all
had questions, as did my reporting partner and I. Their feedback helped us
determine which questions to answer first.
Your audience will write posts for you
“Comments are content,” after
all. We made a habit of curating the best comments in a semi-regular feature
called Mailbag. Sometimes we did so to stir the pot. Other times we did so to
highlight the best of an ongoing conversation
taking place right under our noses.
Your audience will help you keep an ear
to the ground
In 2012, anyone who was anyone in
Indiana politics assumed the well-funded incumbent for the state’s
highest elected education post, superintendent of public instruction, was going
to win re-election and win big. It was hard to believe the challenger, Glenda
Ritz, would pose any electoral threat. Our commenters overwhelmingly left
pro-Ritz remarks.
They weren’t a representative sample of the electorate by any
stretch. But the comments foretold what would become the electoral
earthquake of Indiana’s 2012 elections: Ritz won, propelled by
activism from some of the same people who were active in our comments section.
Most of the actual networking was happening on Facebook and in person, but our
comments provided a window into their world.
Your audience will even occasionally
predict the future
Call it the comment section ouija
board. After Ritz’s victory, her political opponents sought ways to marginalize
her or even strip her of power. Our commenters saw it coming. On the night of
Ritz’s election, a commenter raised this possibility on one of our posts. The
“legislature could abolish the office as an elected position at [the] end of
her first term,” this person wrote. We
aren’t in the business of looking into crystal balls, but tapping into the
predictions of your commenters can greatly inform your reporting — because
every so often, they’re right.
Your audience will set you straight
Following Ritz’s victory, we analyzed
how her supporters had convinced others to vote for such a political unknown. But one commenter quibbled
with our characterization of how Ritz’s supporters had campaigned — and made
valid points. We can’t have a discussion over wording, phrasing and nuance over
email or social media with our audience like we can in the comments section.
Your audience will surprise you
By a three-to-one margin, we got more
comments from parents and teachers skeptical of the direction lawmakers were
driving Indiana’s education policy; they tended to support Ritz. But commenters
were not absolute in their support, expressing skepticism over Ritz’s decisions
to sue a board of education policymakers. “She’s the one who is going to look
like the villain here,” wrote commenter karynb9, a steadfast Ritz supporter.
Their comments reminded us that our audience, while they have their biases and
predilections, isn’t monolithic or blindly loyal.
This post originally appeared on the
Online News Association's website. It is published on IJNet with permission.
Kyle Stokes is one of ONA's three MJ Bear Fellows,
journalists under age 30 who are expanding the boundaries of digital news. He
is the youth and education reporter at NPR member station KPLU in Seattle. He
spent two-and-a-half years reporting on education for StateImpact Indiana, a
collaboration of WFIU and Indiana Public Broadcasting.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via Ronny-André Bendiksen.
Source: Ijnet.org
No comments:
Post a Comment