Newsless.org

^ Just in case anyone accuses me of not alliterating enough.

Today, approx. 40 years after the rest of the Web figured out how to do good discussions, general-interest news site comment threads mostly remain abysmal. On their best days. They are also the biggest thorn in the side of many an editor.

Many have enumerated where news site discussions often go the way of the suck (including, most helpfully, Derek Powazek):

• Anonymous posting.
• Non-threaded discussions.
• No newsroom participation.
• Forum ghettos.
• Hot-button issues.
• No reputation/ranking/filtering.

Folks are having thoughtful conversations about whether general-interest news can even support communities. I think they can. I’d argue that most of the problems identified above are symptoms of a single underlying affliction: News sites lack persistent, manageable points of focus around which communities can coalesce.

The best communities online all have the feeling of a semi-exclusive club. They cohere around distinctive goals, topics or personalities; they acquire in-jokes, shorthand, traditions; they’re open to newcomers, but oldtimers command respect. They sometimes sprout, like sidewalk grass, in the unlikeliest places, but often grow to resemble each other.

Most online editors have a fond story to tell about a close-knit community that sprung up improbably in a poorly-tended ’90s-era bulletin board in some abandoned crevice of their site. Or a popular blog with a good crowd of commenters.

But ask about the discussions in the news sections and their features will darken, their voices will coarsen, and you’ll be treated to a spittle-flecked recounting of racist rants, libelous tirades, comments mocking murder victims, and the like. The Internet’s id is not a pretty thing, and news story comments are its cavern.

News comments resemble graffiti more than discourse. Largely anonymous taggers come by and leave their marks. Sometimes their work is in response to another tagger, but most often, it’s a subtle variation on “I was here.” Like graffiti, comments are sometimes brilliant, but more frequently are garish and crude.

Unlike Gawker, I think we can fix comments. It is possible to have phenomenal discussions online. Even on general-interest news sites. In the course of my research, I’m considering some of the problems and mulling how my model might offer potential solutions. Derek Powazek’s contribution on this front was fantastic. I’d like to extend his thinking in a couple directions. Here’s what I got so far. Read the rest of this entry »

It rarely fails. When I’m talking about my project, whether I introduce it or not, the word “wiki” will always pop up in the discussion. Sometimes I try to preempt it — “I called my project ‘Wikipedia-ing the News,’ but that’s a misnomer, since the prototype probably won’t be publicly editable …” — but even then, folks invariably come away convinced that the core idea of my project is that news sites should be open to public editing. I’m definitely not saying they shouldn’t, mind you, but the whole issue is askance of my focus with this research project.

Partly to illustrate that point, and partly to get some dialogue going, let me outline a few possible community contribution models a Newsless.org-certified news site could follow, if a traditional news organization were to start it:

• Closed to non-newsroom contributions: All edits to stories are made by newsroom staff, just the way they are on most big-media news sites today. For better or worse, this is the model we’ll likely use for the prototype, though I do want to make sure we provide a robust forum for community engagement.¹
• Completely open to non-newsroom contributions: A straight-up wiki, through and through.
• A mix of closed and open sections: The Wikipedia model. Particularly controversial topics could be placed under edit restrictions, while lower-intensity subjects could be open to public editing.
• Community contributions are moderated: There are many ways that could work. For example, here are two:
  • The newsroom controls a “final” version of the site, and a “draft” version is open to the community. Similar to the way most open-source software projects work. In the default view, all content has been vetted by authorized editors, but if you wanted to contribute information, you could add it to the draft version of any page. At regular intervals, editors vet new contributions to the draft site and commit valid changes to the core site.
  • Community members’ edits are held in moderation until approved. Similar to the one above, but there’s only one version of the site. Another twist on this approach is that you might allow good contributors to gain automatic edit rights if their edits are consistently approved.

Many potential approaches, each with certain tradeoffs and advantages. Any of them could work with the structural transformation in journalism we’re outlining here.

1. Although comments on stories clearly count as “community contributions,” I’m excluding them from all of these models. For the purposes of this post, let’s define “contributions” as edits or addition to the core site content. [↩]