For a couple years now, I’ve been working with editors, reporters, and commenters on news sites taking the following hypothesis as a given:
Commenters will be the most civil in the place that is the most public.
For example, I expected commenters on news stories, where more people could see their words, to be more civil than [...]
All about comments
Commenting survey results
January 7, 2009
A quick survey about comments on your news site
December 31, 2008
I have a little theory.
It’s my opinion that commenters — or anyone, really — is the most civil when they’re speaking in public and everyone can see who they are.
So, I think that news site commenters/readers are most civil on news story comments, then blog posts, then message board threads. When I popped off about [...]
What your news organization can learn from the Crunchberry project
December 15, 2008
First, two items for the glossary so I can make sorted references to mixed berries in this post:
Crunchberry.org = The virtual home of the Medill J-School’s Knight News Challenge grantee programmer/journalists.
Newsmixer.us = The demo of the community conversation application the Crunchberry team built for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a newspaper in Iowa which might recognize [...]
On IdeaLab: Stack Overflow is your premium question answer tool
November 14, 2008
I’m trying to get into the habit of posting a few medium-length items over at IdeaLab every week. here’s a start:
Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems
The premise? Stack Overflow, a new-ish site for programmers to answer each other’s questions, has a great voting system for comments, which are really just the answers [...]
Why commenting on news sites still stinks: Further notes on the commenting survey results
The most striking conclusion I’ve come to based on the results of the commenting survey that 49 online news folks answered over the last week or two was this:
Commenting on news stories is still broken. Busted. Stinks. It’s a mudpit. Still.
I’ve been writing about how to improve commenting on news sites for a couple years [...]
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