Don’t forget, comments work both ways

An interesting post on the Online Journalism Blog about the dangers of ignoring comments.

The lesson: You do so at your peril.

I’m not sure if this is a British thing or a newspaper thing. I don’t know many places that wouldn’t even bother to post such comments, though I do know many that would simply ignore it. Or, worse yet, not even bother to read it.

The commenters aren’t just addressing each other; sometimes they’re addressing us, as well. And maybe they’re wrong or biased. But maybe they’re right. It’s our responsibility to make sure we figure out which is the case, and if we’re wrong, we need to fix it quickly.

Otherwise, we could find ourselves making enemies.

Truer words have rarely been spoken

Sally Witt talks about how important it is to stop worry about how good something is and just start doing it.

Talk about a lesson we all need to hear, but should have already learned. Media companies are often paralyzed because we hold up an ideal for our content that we can’t meet — at least not at first. When we the last time you were good at anything you’d only tried a few times?

Takeaway lesson: you’ll never be perfect at something you don’t try.

So what are you waiting for?

She forgot step six: die of exhaustion

Allison Gow had a really good post about all the ways we can use Web 2.0 in our reporting, broken down in five steps.

Now if you did all of the parts of every step for every story, you’d be accused of not being productive enough. But I think reporters could learn a lot about the different ways to find and disseminate information, and there’s a lot of really great ideas in the post.

So what have you done to bring your reporting more into line with Web 2.0?

A strategy we can steal — er borrow

I was pretty surprised by a commercial on the Olympics by shoe-makers Crocs. The site invited users to upload videos about the shoes saying why they loved — or hated — the shoes.

The site has a bunch of videos now, of varying levels of production quality, ranting or raving about Crocs. It’s an unusual idea for a company, to give hate the same billing as love. But it makes sense.

There are a lot of places for people to spew hate on the Internet, so why not try and corral it when you can?

And for newspapers, it’s even more useful. We are — and we should be — polarizing. People will be angry about our editorials and have opinions about our stories. Why not give them a place to talk? It would be useful to find out what people are thinking and what we might need to change.

There will inevitably be the usual trolling: OMG yr paper is teh sux0rz! Die plz. Kthxbai

The Crocs site doesn’t have to deal with that as much, because they set a relatively high bar to entry. But we can igore the useless comments and work on fixing the problems we find. It helps to follow Chip Scanlan’s advice to Be a sponge, be a duck.

So are any papers out there giving people a place to talk specifically about the issues they have with the paper?

Commenting on comments

There was some flap a couple of weeks ago when news/gossip site Gawker suggested that newspapers stop allowing comments.

The points made are pretty valid: commenters are often rude, off-topic or both. Newspapers would never publish much of what’s said in comments on their editorial pages, and people are allowed to hide behind pseudonyms.

The writer makes the argument that newspapers should be in the news business and blogs should be in the business of trafficking in comments. But that misses the point. Comments, no matter how nasty, are a useful addition to newspaper stories.

Comments are not a conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are lots of ways to have conversations on the Internet, and newspapers are looking to add more all the time. But the gut-level reaction that stories provoke is worth giving its own forum.

Take our recent live coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cedar Rapids.

One person wants to know why we’re bothering, when people could just read about the visit in the next day’s paper. I’ll leave you to absorb the irony of making such a comment on a Web site.

Others spend a lot of time arguing about Obama’s merits,  in sometimes crude terms. But they’d be doing that anyway. We’re just letting those comments take place out in the open.

That’s part of the new mission of the media. We’re not just telling people what’s happening anymore, we need to listen to what they have to say, as well.

We need to do more to foster real conversations and to make sure the trolls don’t take over. But that doesn’t mean we should stop letting people comment on our stories.

When should we be using video

New Jersey’s Star-Ledger is starting a webcast. Some analysis from Jeff Jarivs of it can be found here

He likes it a lot, but others are at best indifferent. I fall firmly in the second camp, and I’ve helped to start a webcast for a newspaper once. More than a year ago, this was the Next Big Thing. Places like the Roanoke Times led the curve with them, and won all kinds of awards.

But, as mentioned in the comments, the Times’ webcast is dead. It didn’t get traction with viewers or advertisers, only getting a few hundred hits per episode. Maybe the paper isn’t big enough, with a circulation of about 100,000.

Or maybe there’s a bigger issue: Webcasts don’t work for newspapers.

It doesn’t matter if they’re well-produced or just ape TV news, it’s the wrong format. Daily casts like rocketboom.com worked (when they did) because they had a fresh, funny take on the news delivered by a recognizable personality.

But this post about the death of Roanoke’s webcast also brings up a good point: people don’t go on the Web to have stories bundled together, they go online to pick out interesting stories.

That’s where video shines: one-topic, short videos. If you’re good and can build an audience, that will drive much more traffic than a Webcast ever will.

Social media = good. Job in aforementioned = even better

I’m getting ready to start a new gig at The Gazette, as Social Media Guide.

The name came from Gazette editor Steve Buttry, and is a pretty good description. I’ll be helping move the paper toward becoming more interactive.

The idea is that we need to implement features to get our readers more involved. It’s not the only tool in the tool box, but giving people a place to come together is a way we can start to help foster community.

I’ll be blogging about what we’re trying, what works and what doesn’t, and the long road toward our vision. Should be a fun ride.

The man has a point

This man, I mean. His argument is that newspapers still have a long way to go on the Web. I don’t think anyone in newspapers would disagree with that.

We worry about leaking our enterprise stories too early, we don’t always follow stories with consistent updates, and, let’s face it, there are a lot of newspaper sites that are hard, if not impossible to navigate.

And the points he makes are valid. Changing the link structure is a great way to make sure no one sees a story again, and making readers login is a great way to make sure no one sees a story in the first place. Online analytics have come far enough that you don’t need to have a list of registered users, you can find out how many people are actually reading and go from there.

But the best point he has is one we should have gotten a long time ago: we need to stick with what we know best. A Web site isn’t like a newspaper, and the idea of a monolithic information provider is dead. So why do so many papers keep bombarding readers with wire copy they can get elsewhere. That space could be better used to showcase more of our local expertise, and to get good stories in front of more eyes.

I’m back

And I’ll be posting regularly again. The vacation was wonderful. You can see lots of pictures and read our impressions here.

spotty posting

It’s been a hectic week, so I haven’t posted much. The next two weeks will be shot, as well, as I’m heading to Ireland for a long-planned, much-anticpated vacation.

We’re going in honor of my grandfather, who died last June. You can follow our trip at http://www.thekellysgotoireland.com

We’ll be updating with photos, video and text as often as we can get Internet access.