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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: What happened after 7 news sites got rid of reader comments Recode, Reuters, Popular Science, The Week, Mic, The Verge, and USA Today’s FTW have all shut off reader comments in the past year. Here’s how they’re all using social media to encourage reader discussion. For a short period at the end of 2014, it appeared that publishers had reached a breaking point in their ongoing struggle with reader comments. Within a few weeks of each other, Recode, Mic, The Week, and Reuters all announced that they were closing down their comment sections. They joined the ranks of other outlets, including The Chicago Sun-Times and Popular Science, that abandoned the practice in favor of letting users discuss stories on social channels instead. RELATED ARTICLE Some news orgs are killing comments, but not just because their commenters are terrible at being humans April 15, 2014 Many news organizations have had comments sections for as long as they’ve been online. For just as long, many have agonized over the value of the conversations that rage in the space below a story. There’s plenty of debate over the issue, as newsrooms struggle with moderation, the value of anonymity among commenters, and, in some cases, the legal issues that arise from what’s said in the comments. “If I was painting a picture of a site we were gonna have, and then at the end I said, ‘Oh, by the way, at the bottom of all our articles we’re going to prominently let any pseudonymous avatar do and say whatever they want with no moderation’ — if there was no convention of Internet commenting, if it wasn’t this thing that was accepted, you would think that was a crazy idea,” said Ben Frumin, editor-in-chief of http://TheWeek.com. The 2014 baccalaureate ceremomy held in Woolsey Hall featured addresses by President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Mary Miller. RELATED ARTICLE After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet’s conversation moves…to Facebook June 3, 2015 Social media has changed the equation for a number of publishers that already use Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr to distribute their stories to new audiences. As Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg wrote on Recode’s decision to end comments: “We believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years.” The benefits to social are that people are already on those networks, already holding conversations and sharing stories, Swisher told me. “It’s not clear why comments are a particularly good part of the [website] experience,” she said. I spoke to seven news organizations — Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today’s FTW — about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now. All but one of the sites say they won’t be going back; The Verge is selectively using comments on stories and plans to re-introduce them across the site in the near future, according to editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. Transcripts of our conversations, below, are edited slightly for clarity and length. Poster Comment: Dan Colarusso, executive editor of Reuters.com: We’re not the kind of news organization that’s about giving our ‘take’ on something. We’re not looking to start an argument; we’re looking to report the news. We felt that, since so much of the conversation around stories had gravitated toward social, that was the better place for that discourse to happen. We did keep comments on our opinion pieces, because we felt that that is where you are trying to start an argument in the best possible way. [Commenting] wasn’t a main lever of engagement for us, quite frankly. If it were, we might have taken a different approach to it, as opposed to just removing it wholesale. I don’t remember the exact data around our analysis, but it was a fraction of our traffic or engagement. We didn’t feel as if there was a lot going on there, anyway; it hadn’t become as fertile and diverse as our audience was. Until four or five months ago, we only had social media for [Reuters.com] out of New York. We hired Jamillah Knowles to be deputy social editor out of London, to keep us starting a conversation earlier around stories and to give us a truly global feel. That’s one part, just expanding how often we’re actually manually active on [social]. We’re pitching stories forward and putting stuff out that’s not on an auto feed. It’s engendering conversation. The other thing we’ve done — we haven’t done it in hard news yet, but we’ve done it in personal finance here in the States — is Twitter chats with readers and our wealth team. Lauren Young runs them out of New York, and we do one a month right now. We’re thinking of expanding that to news and other issues. I think the way [engagement] was being done, the game had passed it by. We’re in a unique position to put a fine point on engagement. I consider us to be in the age of engagement right now, in the sense that our social thrust has a very specific plan behind it. Rebuilding our CMS and tweaking our article-level pages is about engagement. Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode: We do [discussion] online, on social networks, on Facebook, on Twitter especially. We’ll be trying out Snapchat and various things, but it’s largely Facebook and Twitter. For example, our Elizabeth Warren interview got a million views and likes on Facebook. We did a story called Game of Drones that just has gone crazy on Twitter. We just had a series of videos about women techies. p> We get a lot of response, opinion, and commentary there, and also great retweets and likes, especially from well-known people who wouldn’t necessarily comment on one of our sites. Melinda Gates went crazy for our women in tech series. When she [tweeted it], that was so much more helpful than if she had just said ‘great job’ on the site or something. Women in computing has fallen noticeably. Glad @Recode & others are challenging the trend: http://t.co/HVi23wOq4w pic.twitter.com/wLHKObAeDp — Melinda Gates (@melindagates) August 19, 2015 We want to have a broad audience, but we also have a very heavy-infuencer audience. We want them to see we’re on these social media platforms. That’s where they engage, so that’s where we engage with them. [Social media] is just a better place to engage a smart audience that’s not trolling. We got a lot of trouble in our comments on different stories — attacks on our writers, just stupid things; it wasn’t smart. I know that Gawker’s trying to develop a smart comments system. And I think Jessica Lessin is doing a nice job on The Information, because she has subscribers. So that’s a different level of people who pay to subscribe, they’re very different. We try other things. We do newsletters every day. We do, obviously, the events. They’re a great way to reach out to people. We do a podcast now, which is really helpful. So we try everything, we try to reach out in lots of ways. We love it, we’re thrilled. We’re very happy. We didn’t have the time and didn’t see the benefit of continuing with the comments. Things have changed; you have to change with them. And a lot of people followed in our footsteps, which is fascinating. At first, everyone was like ‘how dare you,’ and then a lot of people did it. And a lot more will do it over time. Ben Frumin, editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com: Like many sites, we saw a small number of pseudonymous commenters who were just going to reflexively say nasty stuff no matter what. We felt that that was the opposite of our mission, which is to bring the smartest and best ideas to readers in a concise and helpful way. xkcd-throwing-rocks RELATED ARTICLE Can comment sections contain (gasp!) rational, coherent, civil debate? Maybe? Sometimes? June 24, 2015 Building a commenting system where people would have to comment as their real selves, or moderating a commenting system where people were allowed to continue commenting pseudonymously, was really a resource issue for us. We’re small. We like to think of ourselves as a scrappy maverick. We compete with people who are bigger than us; we like to think we punch above our weight class. But we’re not the sort of operation that can moderate tens of thousands of comments a month. We just don’t have the manpower. A really big part of it, though, is the idea, as I wrote last year, that I just don’t think [comments are] a core function or service of news and opinion sites anymore. When we were making this decision last year, we looked a lot at the data. The most comments we ever had in a single month was July of 2014, when we had some 68,000 comments. That sounds like a lot. But we also had 12 million unique visitors that month. When you start to look at it that way, even if every comment was created by an individual commenter — which is not the way it works; surely several of those commenters commented hundreds of times — 68,000 commenters would still be dramatically less than one percent of our total readership. We’ve seen engagement skyrocket. Now, closing the comments section is not the only thing we’ve done. We’ve redesigned our whole site; there are a number of potentially confounding variables in the statistics. But I do think commenting is a part of it. We’ve seen our pages per visit nearly double since we closed the comments section. We’ve seen our bounce rate nearly cut in half since we closed the comments. On our site, we’ve seen engagement go up. Off of our site, on some social platforms, we see really robust and thoughtful conversations: On our Facebook page, off of our Facebook page but being sparked by our content, and on Twitter. [Social media] in its best form leads to really rich conversations. Obviously, in its worst form, it can lead to partisan name-calling by a small number of vitriol-spewing readers. Carl Franzen, online director for Popular Science: We use input from readers online (in the form of traffic analytics and emails) and in print (we still get a lot of handwritten letters) to gauge interest in our stories after publication. From there, the editors and writers try to figure out what made certain stories so popular. Online, which is where I primarily work, we’ve also seen a number of trends spring up on social media, which we’ve then reported on as stories for PopSci. This summer’s Christopher Pratt/zookeeper meme inspired by Jurassic World and the #ILookLikeAnEngineer hashtag are just two examples of stories that came out of our close observation of and participation in social media. To be an expert at anything in sci or tech means rolling up your sleeves and getting to work. Watch Dr. @neildegrassetyson illustrate this concept for our new #HowToBeAnExpert guide by smashing a banana frozen with liquid nitrogen! Check out what he and 12 other leaders in the fields of robotics, genetics, electronics, programming, online media, and more have to say about what led to their success in the full guide at popsci.com/expert. link in our bio!And stay tuned for more behind the scenes videos with Dr. Tyson. #pslovesneil (Thank you 📷 @fscottschafer 🎨 @catchlight) A video posted by Popular Science (@popsci) on Aug 19, 2015 We use social media and email newsletters, and we’ll soon be introducing more live events to get readers and audience members involved in sci-tech topics of interest to them and us. Our editors engage with readers on social media on a regular basis, particular Facebook and Instagram, the latter of which we’ve recently been using to ask for input on our content and for submissions as part of science imagery–focused contests. PopSci is lucky in that our community of readers and followers is very curious, positive, and interested in learning more about all sorts of subjects. Many of our readers already use social media to read and share science news, so moving more of our engagement to where they are now just makes perfect sense. Tatarewicz... Would be great if papers published most informative comments from social media. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
Translation: comments are one of the last outposts of free speech, and hey hey ho ho First Amendment's got to go! Salovey -- JUE. Mossberg and Swisher -- probably JUES. “It’s not clear why comments are a particularly good part of the [website] experience” -- ah -- yeah. Sure. Gee, people need to just pull the ethernet plug and watch TV -- right? Good piece, Tata -- but not for the reasons the protagonists would imagine :-7
I used to comment on MSNBC until they changed the format. Felt good to be a voice of reason. After they ditched the commenting, I had no reason to visit the site at all.
Looks like Yahoo has also dropped comments from its site. Probably got tired of complaints/legal threats from Sayanim when Israel's skullduggery was exposed by commentators; decided to let operators of social media sites handle the flak. Yahoo had a sophisticated system; could get any poster's previous posts by clicking name. There was a strong, well-informed anti-Israel contingent on Yahoo.
How long do you give the social media sites -- or have they crumbled since?
How many readers did that cost them?
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
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