Category: engagement

What makes a good newspaper forum?

Alison Gow10 Comments
Are forums the best way of interacting with online users? A quick glance at most newspaper websites would indicate the answer is… no.
Frits van Exter, former editor-in-chief of Trouw newspaper, in the Netherlands, told the World Editor’s Forum earlier this year that such interactivity was an ‘open sewer’ on a newspaper’s website. I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m constantly taken aback by how unpleasant some posters are on newspaper forums – the bullying that goes on in some of them is worthy of the Big Brother house – and it’s easy to see why some new users never log in again after being flamed for voicing an opinion that runs counter to the mob.

What would a new forum member think of this post on the Liverpool Echo Short Points forum, for example?
Would you hang around to see what the existing posters had in store for you? probably not. If you’re wondering, this has provoked 17 other comments – exchanges which became increasingly nasty until everyone seemed to lose interest and went on to find other threads to row on.

Then there are the newspaper websites that say they want to interact while giving out every signal to the contrary.
Click ‘interact’ on www.thisisbristol.co.uk and you’re met with a list of how you can do things… once you’ve filled in forms with several fields. And that’s just to write a letter to the editor. I know data capture is important, but my God, can’t we make it any more subtle than this? Or at least break it up a little? Getting into the site and becoming involved should be easy; after building some trust we can start to ask for more information. Sorry Bristol Post, I’d have to be pretty committed to interacting with my local paper to do this – especially when I could get into a debate with members of Bristol’s Facebook group without going through half the rigmarole

So what makes a good newspaper forum? Personally, I think time, effort and attention are key factors here – too many forums are set up and ignored by newspapers, other than checking for potential stories or libels.
I also reviewed my Delicious bookmarks to see what some of the experts, among them Mark Commerford, Rob Hamman, Chris Brogan and Adam Tinsworth, thought of the subject.
Conclusions? Well, here are some observations:
1. A successful forum is one that the members care about – it feels like a valuable and valued community. Yoliverpool.com is a example of how a successful online community operates and co-operates.
2. Posters need to know the boundaries; post-moderation only works if there is care and consistency.
3. Moderators should be familiar, via bios and links, to the users. They should join threads as participants, point users at interesting or relevant links and seed comments. They should not be intrusive or over-bearing. The ‘Trusted User model, where certain forumites are given moderator status, is a good way of ensuring the sites are not just the responsibility of the paper’s digital team.
4. Where offensive posts are deleted, a reason for the action should be given – transparency avoids conspiracy theory side-threads. For an extreme example – not necessarily recommended – see this.
5. Encourage forum users to own the space and feel responsible for it – plastic.com has a rating system for readers which filters out posts that consistently fail to make the grade. A flagging system can also encourage a commmunity spirit.
Put posts flagged three or more times as inappropriate in a moderation loop so it drops off the site til an official moderator can look at it and decide whether to re-instate it (with an explaination)
6. Reporters should interact on forums – crowdsourcing, replying to posters, starting their own threads; these are all quick, easy ways of building engagement with the wider online community.
7. Have a newbie thread so people can introduce themselves and get used to posting on a fourm. Make it welcoming -it should have a “Hello and welcome to our forum” post before the ‘code of conduct’ post!

These are so many opportunities to make forums more attractive for users; it would perhaps be an idea to have a ‘best practice’ guide or a wiki so people can feed in ideas and share experiences. What do you think?

Networks and Journalism

Alison Gow1 Comment
It’s six months this week since I started spreading myself over the internet’s social sites in an attempt to shift my analogue brain up a gear.
I came home from a TM Leaders course last January shocked by my ignorance of Web 2.0 opportunities, and determined to do something about it. It started as a mild Twitter habit and has become an all pervading part of my life; one that has had an incredibly positive effect on my ability to do my job.

Contacts on my networks point me – either intentionally or as part of wider community sharing – at blog posts, sites, information streams and applications I would never have found out about on my own. I made a powerpoint recently and e-Grommet suggested I try it out on Slideshare, which I’d heard of but never used. As a result of joining that, and sharing information about myself and my interests, I found a real wealth of knowledge, including this great presentation about how how to understand the post Web 2.0 world which states, very neatly, the importance of networks.

Online networks, for me, offer a glimmer of hope for the survival of mainstream journalists – if we are just prepared to get out, get involved and share. These sites are the best way of reaching a worldwide network of experts and commentators (blogs, vlogs, podcasts, homepages), disgrunted whistle-blowers (forums, blogs) and potential readers. They let us market ourselves, our surveys and our stories, crowdsource, make eye-contact with people and ask them a question (I love Seesmic for this).

I was reading Adam Tinsworth’s One Man and His Blog this week for his take on how the media gets the whole ‘community’ thing wrong. It’s a great post and I’ve bookmarked it because I know I’ll want to re-read it – and share it.

I find our little locked-off world deeply frustrating. Mainstream journalism is like a hunter-gatherer hugging all the food to itself and dispensing it grudgingly, then expecting everyone else to share during the lean times.
And the sad thing is, it’s not deliberate. There aren’t many journalists who make a concientous decision to closet themselves away and be spoon-fed stories; they just wind up in this situation because there is no time. There’s no time to experiment, learn or even explore things online.

I’m always checking my networks at work; it isn’t a question of not having that enough to do – I’m always juggling myriad deadline-orientated tasks. What I do is snatch moments to visit networks and see what experts are discussing, what links they have found that might help me, and what is going on in the world beyond the enclosing walls of my office – and my own head.

So, six months in and I’m still learning, still getting things wrong, still loving this whole social media thing. I’ve made good friends, new contacts, had amazing, interesting conversations with people on the other side of the world whom I will never meet face-to-face, and whose support and feedback I value.

Journalism is a huge part of my life and it pains me to fall out with it but right now so many people in journalism are nodding at the right places while secretly wishing the interet would just go away. I don’t know where our industry is heading but I know that ultimately it will have to be a vastly different beast – leaner, wiser and (whisper it) a bit more respectful to social networks.

Taking the LDP live for a day

Alison Gow5 Comments
Tuesday May 13 will be the day I go grey, bite off all my nails, and possibly take up smoking again.
For Tuesday is the day the LDP goes live for a day. From 7am when the first stories are uploaded to http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk until 1am when the last page is sent down to the press room, our decisions and actions will be live to the world and up for scrutiny and questioning.
I’d started outlining the Bambuser Plot to the editor when he interrupted and said: “Why don’t we just go live for the whole day?” in true Early Adopter fashion.
The LDP will run a live blog via coveritlive.com all day so anyone and everyone can log on, follow what we’re up to, get involved and post questions, observations and tell us how and why they want the news reported.
Reporters will be online through the day, talking to people who are logged on, blogging what they’re up to or streaming from jobs.
The political reporter will crowdsource our audience for questions and topics before he goes to inteview Alistair Darling, and we’re also going to stream afternoon conference on Qik.
The reaction from the various business, news, features and sports editors is really positive, and the writers seem to be up for it too. And those people from the TM Leaders course I’ve told have been very supportive.
I think we’re getting funny glances from our sister paper – the main thing puzzling them seems to be why we would open ourselves up in such a way – but personally I think we as an industry have got to put aside this air of mystery and preciousness we like to cultivate around the way we allow stories to be told. There are enough rival mainstream news operatives and quality bloggers on Merseyside sharing information with our potential audience for us to have to look at the way we work; Tuesday is a way of trying to reconnect with past, present (and hopefully future)audience. We’ll test the technology and hopefully change some mindsets – internal and external.
It’s all set – I’ve written a page lead for Monday’s paper and online, and I’m letting the local radio stations know tomorrow. Everything is steaming ahead… but it’s nervewracking.
Will people like it? My hope is that while we’re bound attract criticism from some of those who log on, at the end of the day a proportion of our audience will feel more emotionally involved with the newspaper.
That kind of involvement is what all newspapers need to be reaching for right now.

Too much information?

Alison GowLeave a comment
I am spreading over the web like mould. I am on, among others, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Jaiku, and Bambuser and that’s just a part of it. My ‘social networks’ folder is growing at an alarming rate.
I embarked on this to learn more about the internet and interact with people online because I thought it would benefit my understanding of Web 2.0 and, by association, my newspaper.
I don’t use aliases on sites, I have my little avatar who goes everywhere online with me and so is fairly identifiable as me I guess, and I have links back to this blog which, of course, says where I work and live.
When someone I don’t know starts following me on Twitter I tend to send them a ‘hello’ note so there’s some human contact. I love it when I get responses to my Utterz, and ridiculously happy when someone I don’t know comments on this blog.
I have, I think, gone native in my attempts to understand newspapers and Web 2.0 – and I’m pleased about that. It feels like a constant learning process and there’s always something interesting going on.
My immersion in the internet was brought home to me today as I explained Twitter reporters who had just been asked to sign up to the service ahead of the local elections.
They think I’m obsessed. I think they’re probably right…

Forums v Comment

Alison Gow2 Comments
I’m starting to think the Daily Post should reinstate the old ‘have your say’ option under our web articles.
We used to have them but they were scrapped because posts had to be moderated before they could be uploaded manually.
This meant sometimes comments posted on Saturday evening wouldn’t appear online until Monday morning.
So now we have the forums – which are moderated after the post has been uploaded. So you get the odd spam advert on them, and the occasional idiot indulging in name-calling, but otherwise it runs smoothly.
All well and good.
But I suspect some people prefer to just comment-and-go, rather than go through the hassle of signing in to a forum and, potentially, having to create a new thread.
The Lancashire Evening Telegraph offers this this.
Maybe forums are areas were people have conversations with each other, and comment boxes are where they have conversations with the newspaper?