Community

So, it’s Carnival of Journalism time of the month again, and ringmaster David Cohn this time has posed the question, “Considering your unique circumstances, what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?”

OK, that’s an easy one when I apply my “unique circumstances,” which is that I live in Boulder, Colorado, and focus my career on digital media. You see, there’s this project at work that this question is tailored for, exactly. The result so far is the website SlicesofBoulder.com, which is a project that’s part of my Digital Media Test Kitchen program at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication (and utilizing technology and consulting from our Toronto friends at Eqentia).

SlicesofBoulder at this point addresses David’s question by not “increasing” the number of news sources serving Boulder, but rather by “finding” them, since so many exist online. Last summer, we (SJMC instructor Sandra Fish, master’s student researcher Jenny Dean, and I) attempted to find all the credible news and information sources in and around Boulder that send content about Boulder flowing onto the web. (If you want to know more, here’s an old blog post explaining the project.)

Here’s my first point: There’s no great need to increase the number of news sources, at least in our scenic college town of Boulder, nor in most cities. If you expand your definition of “news source” beyond its traditional meaning, Boulder and lots of other communities have hundreds or thousands of “news” sources online.

Where the need exists is not in “creating” more news sources, but rather in developing “online hubs” like SlicesofBoulder.com to track them all, intelligently sort and filter them, and provide a simple-to-use interface and personalization features so online users can find the flow of news and information they want from all the sources that now exist in this digital, everyone’s-a-publisher age.

I used the term “online hub” above because that was Recommendation #15 of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy’s Informing Communities report: “Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.”

Anyway, for Boulder, at least, the first pass at creating a community online hub has been accomplished. But the next step, I believe, is the most important: Developing systems to analyze and rate the many online news and information sources that serve a community like Boulder, so that a local resident who while using our online hub comes upon a never-seen-before website, or blog, or institutional news feed, or whatever is able to determine if this unknown digital-content entity provides credible information or not.

Researcher Robin Donovan and I currently are working on this next phase of the SlicesofBoulder project. The idea is that a user of the site will be able to see credibility, accuracy, bias, popularity, and other ratings of any source that we track on the site.

My dream is that at some point in the near future, I’ll have a web-browser extension (or the functionality will be built into the browser) that will give me a wide range of ratings representing various and multiple parameters for whatever website I find myself on.

I don’t know that the need is so much that we need to create more news and information sources online, but rather that of the unfathomable number of sources that already exist on the web to provide us with news and information, that we have a way to know whether to trust them or not, or have some indication of their quality based on multiple layers of automated and human analysis.

I’ll be interested to read other contributions to this month’s Carnival of Journalism. Perhaps other writers will suggest that we do need more sources. If so, I’ll be especially interested in how they justify that when we already are faced as news/information consumers with major digital information overload.

I’ve been neglectful of this blog for nearly a month (till posting about Paycheckr yesterday), but perhaps I can get back into the groove. It’s just that I’ve been working hard at driving forward the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. And since the School is going through a “discontinuation review” and might be reinvented or replaced by a new School (or other form of academic entity) designed to be more interdisciplinary in addressing the complexities of today’s journalism and media realities, it seems like an important time to push forward on leveraging emerging technologies in the pursuit of better journalism and better informing communities.

At the Test Kitchen, we just debuted a new website, SlicesofBoulder.com, that fits that bill. Working with Toronto-based Eqentia Inc., a CU team (journalism instructor Sandra Fish, journalism master’s candidate Jenny Dean, and me) worked over the summer to produce an extensive taxonomy of the city of Boulder and its surrounding area, and find all the news and information sources online producing content about Boulder. (I.e., not just websites and blogs that fit the traditional definition of “news,” but also the information flowing out of scientific institutions, government agencies, police and fire departments, key local companies, local bloggers and tweeters, etc.)

The result is SlicesofBoulder.com, powered by Eqentia.com, which processes and slices and dices links to the content flowing from hundreds of local sources, plus finds news coverage about Boulder from non-Boulder (state and national) news sites and selected credible blogs.

What’s exciting for me about this project is that it is, I’m pretty sure, the most in-depth curated news and information site in existence about any city. (Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.) The site can serve in an in-depth manner the ongoing news and information needs of any Boulder resident with a specific topic interest (city politics, Boulder crime news, the local rock climbing scene, a specific local company like Celestial Seasonings, a specific neighborhood, and so on). It continually tracks Boulder news and and information digital content flow, and provides links to the original content. (Users can create a personalized Boulder news/info page; receive a personalized daily e-mail; subscribe to fine-grain RSS feeds; etc.)

The site could be described as a “hyper-local” aggregator in that it identifies fine-grain content feeds from sources that Google News, Yahoo! Local, Topix.com, and Outside.in don’t get to.

It’s not a creator of original content, of course, but rather a curated aggregator of local sources — so my hope is that it will help new hyper-local blogs and news outlets in and around Boulder be exposed to new users.

In addition to being just plain useful (to keep citizens informed at either a local overview level or deeply on specific local topics, and to give local journalists story ideas), I’m fascinated by the research potential of the project. It gives us a snapshot of the Boulder digital media-sphere today, and we’ll use the site to watch as the Boulder digital media landscape evolves in the coming years. (My prediction: further decline in news output by traditional local news media, and growth of small local and hyper-local news providers to make up for that.)

Boulder is a university town with 100,000 or so residents, so researching and finding all the local online sources of news and information was a doable task. (I know we haven’t found them all, and expect that the team will discover more, and that community members will suggest additional sources.) The research work to find all the sources in, say, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area, which both have a thriving online independent local and hyper-local media scene, would be daunting; though perhaps crowd-sourcing plus dedicated researchers would make it possible.

The surprise for me was in finding fewer individuals providing news about Boulder’s neighborhoods than I’d expected. I thought we’d find more people using the free publishing tools of the web to keep their neighbors informed, a trend that’s common in some other cities. Perhaps it has to do with demographics: Boulder’s population is one the most highly educated in the U.S., and I’m wondering if that has something to do with it. (We’re all mostly too busy to do volunteer work like run neighborhood blogs or websites?)

If you’d like more information about the SlicesofBoulder.com project, feel free to contact me. A backgrounder about the project and site is here.

Over on the website of the Digital Media Test Kitchen (I’m director of that program at CU-Boulder), I’ve posted an update on one of our projects, called “Slices of Boulder,” which we’re working on with a technology partner, Toronto-based Eqentia, using its semantic publishing and distribution platform.

Work is happening over the summer, including building a taxonomy for the city of Boulder and surrounding communities, and identifying all of the local news and information digital sources currently in operation and serving Boulder’s residents. The latter is a fascinating, if big, task; the number of online sources of local, niche-local, hyper-local, and neighborhood news and information sources has grown significantly in the last year or two.

If you head on over to the Test Kitchen site at the link above, you’ll see a table I created of just some of the varied online sources available in the Boulder area today. The breadth and scope of the list (and what I published is just a small sample) is impressive. There’s a lot of diversity in the digital media-scape these days, even within a single mid-sized city. (Try this for a bigger city like Seattle, and you’ll be even more impressed by the growth of the “5th estate.”)

The reason for this, of course, is both the ease and low cost for anyone to publish in the digital age, and the decline in our local legacy news organizations, which just like in most other communities have seen editorial workforce reductions that leave holes in coverage of the Boulder area.

We expect to have a working website, a deep local-news-and-info aggregator, ready by the end of the summer or early fall.

To continue on my recent commenting theme, I noticed that the new Bay Citizen non-profit online news venture edited by Jonathan Weber is taking a no-anonymity line with its user comments. Here’s Weber in his editor’s blog yesterday:

“There are a number of ways in which people can be part of The Bay Citizen, and each has its own dynamics. There are comments on stories, and we decided to require real names for comments in the hope of engendering a more civilized and useful conversation than is often found in the discussion threads of news sites. Already, though, we have had people register under fake names, so we may have to spend more time policing that than we had hoped.“

This follows my preference for user comments on general-news websites: require real names; no payment required to post comments. Despite the people who will get around the policy by signing up with fake names in order to stay anonymous, this still will improve the quality of the comments discussion, and require much less policing than allowing anonymity.

If too many people register under fake names, Weber can always implement harsher measures, such as requiring a credit card number to confirm a person’s identity, or requiring people who want to comment to authenticate through a service like Truyoo.

Or take my earlier suggestion: Flag accounts that you can identify as people signing up with fake names to have their comments go through a moderation queue, while real-name users post directly to the comment threads.

Civility (and lack thereof) on many news websites, the topic of my previous blog post, is clearly worth more discussion. A bit of brow-beating of me by Josh Young, social news editor for HuffingtonPost.com, today on Twitter gives me the opportunity to continue the conversation … and fight back:

@jny2 Seriously, @steveouting, what do you know about news sites handling tens of thousands of comments a day?

@jny2 I led huffpo’s comments operations for a year, till recently, and I can say that Steve’s piece is thin and unoriginal.

@jny2: @umairh what did you like so much about this unoriginal and, frankly, tepid “fix” for commenting at news sites?

Josh, I’ve been operating and reporting on online communities since 1994. Much has changed over the years, obviously. When I started my first forum (an e-mail discussion list for online-news professionals), we didn’t even have spam to deal with for a couple years. Some of our members preferred to remain anonymous; they let their words and their intellect speak for themselves. I don’t see that as much anymore, and on a professional forum someone not using his/her real name is less likely now to be taken seriously.

True, I have not run a site that handles tens of thousands of user comments a day.

HuffPost does better than most news sites at handling comments, which is hardly surprising. Unlike legacy news brands, HuffPost is an online pure-play where user participation is understood to be critical, and the site utilizes many features to make the comment experience better: Commenters can have “fans”; commenters can get “badges” to gain social status; community moderators watch over things; users can click “flag as abusive”; viewers of comments can select to read all comments, HuffPost editor picks comments, comments from the user’s social stream, etc. But the site still has trolls, and it’s far from perfect.

My suggestion was aimed at the news websites that don’t have the resources (or cultural imperative) to do a good job with controlling user comments, and where trolls run wild and the level of discussion is, for the most part, lame. That would describe many newspaper websites. They have a problem in need of solutions.

What might solve their problems would not be appropriate for other types of websites. Niche and professional sites, in general, have less of a problem with abusive commenters and trolls; there’s more agreement among the user base, whether it be rock climbers or elementary-school teachers. Even HuffPost has more homogeneity (left-leaning audience) than your average newspaper, which draws people across the spectrum of controversial topics who can get heated up quickly.

So, Josh, while you may find my suggestion “tepid,” it may be for you and HuffPost, but not for news sites that serve the broad political spectrum and lack the resources (or knowledge of solutions) that you do to devote to commenting.

I will admit to being idealistic when it comes to online community and discussion. You’ll find evidence of that in an old blog post of mine: “Ender’s Game and the intelligent ‘nets’.” Perhaps, in time, discussion forums will become what Orson Scott Card envisioned: valuable to society.

You could argue that some of the more prominent news brands have created user commenting that is of high quality and value: The Economist, NYTimes.com, etc. For most news sites, and certainly the dominant one in my town, no way; the troll population and the lack of civility keeps out many of those who have something of value to contribute.

Josh: With your experience at HuffPost, what would you suggest as solutions for the type of news sites that I’m talking about?

When comments come into this blog, I moderate them before they are published. Like most blogs (or any web publishing platform that accepts user comments), this one receives far more comment spam than legitimate comments. Comment anti-spam program Askimet catches, I’d guess, more than 99% of my incoming comment spam.

In the last few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of comment spammers getting past Askimet and into my comment approval queue. What’s both annoying and amusing is that the way these spammers are getting past my anti-spam measure is that they are writing personalized notes, which also include a link to some spammy website.

Here’s an example I ran across in my web travels today, on another site:

That one is of the generic “That was a terrific post! I’ve bookmarked your blog!” variety. Comment spam filters catch most of those, though not that one.

The ones that do get through to my moderation queue on this blog actually refer to what I was writing about. Someone (I’m imagining a low-paid Nigerian with at least rudimentary English skills working in a comment-spam sweatshop) is banging out inane comments but actually reading bloggers’ posts, or at least headlines, and tayloring the spam comment to the blog post it’s aimed at.

I’d post an example, but I usually click the “spam” button to delete them. I decided to write about this after twice today coming across on other sites these kinds of spam comments that got through to publication — because those site owners don’t moderate or vet comments before they’re published online, relying solely on a comment spam filter to catch this crap. But if the spammers are personalizing the comments to what you’re writing about, it’s unlikely that a filter will catch those.

So here’s my plea: Start moderating your user comments before publication. It’s a real turn-off to visit a blog or website and see that the owner is letting this happen.

At an increasing number of websites, this latest form of comment spam is adding to the chaos that’s already rampant in comment threads when site owners don’t require commenters to user their real names. So you end up with, as New York Times media reporter David Carr describes them, lots of stupid, often disgusting comments from the “low sloping forehead” crowd.

Here’s a second suggestion, and this one is aimed especially at newspaper websites, many of which are guilty of letting their user comments turn into online cesspools: It’s high time to start demanding that those who wish to comment on a story presented on a website or blog to use their real names and register their personal data (i.e., name and confirmed e-mail address). Those who abide by this rule can have their comments posted immediately and unmoderated.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons sometimes for an online user to post a comment anonymously. But that’s easy to handle, in different ways:

• Set up a “post anonymously” comment form, but have an editor moderate those comments
• Allow pseudonyms instead of real names on user accounts, but always moderate those comments

Too many untended user-comment threads, especially on news sites which are of course filled with controversial content and issues, are starting to really stink. It well past the time to start cleaning out the stench and saying goodbye to the anonymous trolls.

Face it, for many of you right now, your user comments suck. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Last night I was reminded of the power that digital media have of bringing people together. My wife and I attended a birthday party for our friend, Bud, who chose the occasion to hold the debut public concert for his basement band, tentatively called “Doc Hollywood.” He rented the Altona Grange Hall north of Boulder and he and the band invited their friends (who brought food and tossed money into a big jar to cover the hall rental).

The band that Craigslist formed.

Now Bud and the band are not exactly spring chickens. (Surely it’s OK to use that cliche when I’m writing about an event in a grange hall. ) The average age of the musicians is in the 50s; Bud is 57, and recently rediscovered his love of playing the drums, which he’d put aside since he was in his teens and early 20s and played with a rock band.

Other than his wife, Cheri, who sings backup vocals, the rest of the 6-person band was introduced via an ad in Craigslist looking for musicians interested in joining a band for fun. There’s no intention of the group to get paid gigs or otherwise make it big; they’re mostly ordinary folk who used to play and perform when they were younger, and just want to have some fun again.

Now, last week was an awful one for traditional media. The Rocky Mountain News shut down; there’s talk of the San Francisco Chronicle going down; the newspaper industry overall has proven itself mostly unable to handle a bad recession and the challenges of adapting to the digital revolution. Last night’s concert gives a hint as to why, if you look hard enough.

Craigslist, of course, has hit newspaper classifieds hard. The decline of newspaper classifieds revenue is a huge part of the reason for newspapers’ current troubles. It’s not all Craig’s fault, of course, but he has a lot to do with it. But Craigslist’s ability to bring people together is something that newspapers don’t do well at in the digital age. Perhaps in the old days, Bud’s band might have come together via a newspaper classified ad, but more than likely he would have asked friends, or posted a notice at the local music store. Now there’s a better way. Thanks, once again, Craig.

If newspapers are to pull out of their crisis — indeed, if they are to survive long term — they need to learn to take better advantage of the ability of the Internet and mobile devices to introduce people with common interests and bring them together. Alas, most traditional publishers continue to think more about how to make money from the old model of one-to-many, and pay lip service to serving the qualities of the Internet that make it so important to the individuals who live in 2009: its ability to connect people and form communities.

Bud’s band members might have found themselves thanks to a local newspaper’s online service, had that publisher grasped the potential of the Internet as builder of local sub-communities and relationships — and put more effort into developing as part of its digital strategy ways to help people connect and find each other.

Listening to my friend’s band last night, and realizing that they’re all in the age group that still reads newspapers, it occurred to me that were it not for Craigslist, none of us would be in that grange hall. Newspapers still think big; “how can we reach a larger audience with our great content?” They also need to think small; “what can we do to once again be the institution that not only is at the center of our community, but that also facilitates and helps people in our community to create their own connections and communities?”

It’s probably too late for newspapers. But as they struggle to survive, I urge them to spend a lot more time thinking about the small ways they can become big again.

Egads. It was painful reading through the reader comments on this column by Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News, bemoaning the impending doom of his newspaper. (It seems highly unlikely that there’s a white knight in the Rocky’s future, which means it will probably shut down in early 2009, after 150 years of serving Denver.)

Reader comment threads often bring out the loonies, and the thread on Littwin’s column was full of them blaming the Rocky’s failure on its “liberal bias.” I get the occasional e-mail from someone saying that about newspapers in general, since I write a lot about what ails the newspaper industry; I normally write off such comments as the rantings of someone who doesn’t have a clue about the news business.

(You want liberal bias in your news? Listen to or watch Democracy Now. Want right-wing bias? Watch Fox News.)

But the amount of “it’s the liberal bias that’s killing newspapers” (in a country that just elected its first Democratic black president and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress) in this comment thread surprised me; Denver is a pretty “blue” city and long has been.

To those who buy the “liberal bias” argument, I say bullshit. Do some research on the industry; read back over columns that I’ve written for Editor & Publisher Online for many years. Newspapers are suffering mightily now because of the catastrophic hit they’re taking in this recession, on top of secular changes in media consumption habits and advertising shifts that have been evolving over the last decade. On the latter, newspaper executives haven’t mustered the will to transform quickly enough to serve the digital generation, and they would have paid the price for that mistake, recession or not. The severity of this economic crisis just speeded up the process — by a lot.

If political bias in media meant anything and was a financial negative, Fox News would be but a (pleasant) memory instead of a major success story.

(Correction: I originally misspelled Mike Littwin’s name; it’s been fixed above.)

Even though most news websites now allow user comments, it still bugs me to see so little editorial staff participation in comment threads. Having editors and reporters take part and respond to reader comments is a powerful way to keep the discussion more focused and civil. Of course, it’s no guarantee of preventing things from getting out of control, but it helps, a lot.

I just spotted an excellent example (below) of a newspaper staff member diving into an active comment thread. Kudos to Erika Stutzman, editorial page editor of the Boulder Daily Camera, for responding to a user comment that was critical of the paper for publishing a story about its downtown building going up for sale. (The Daily Camera building is prime real estate on the west end of the fabled Pearl Street Mall.)

Yeah, it takes staff journalists extra time to participate. But the benefits of being more “social” online are significant. As modern media consumers now expect their interactions with media companies to be more interactive, diving in and talking directly with readers is necessary for a news organization to remain relevant.

Just a short tip today. … Allow your readers to post comments on your content. (And yes, I mean all of it.) That’s hardly a new idea. Many news websites allow users to post comments on their content. Surprisingly, some still do not. (Which is pretty sad; allowing user comments is the base level for online media interactivity. There’s just no reason not to allow it.)

A recent article by Miami Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal confirmed the wisdom of allowing user comments. In the Letter to Readers, he wrote:

“In the six months since The Miami Herald began publishing comments at the end of online stories, the response has been like nothing we’ve seen before. Hundreds of thousands of readers are posting comments or following along with them each month.”

Continued