



Emma Carmichael: It’s not just a matter of ‘bad comments’

At Jezebel, we take a collective approach to dealing with our comments. We don’t have much of a moderating staff, and so our writers, editors, and approved commenters are responsible for filtering through responses to their posts and taking the lead on having productive, substantive conversations. This is not an ideal arrangement, and it’s created problems for us: in August 2014, just before I took over the site, the staff was dealing with a “rape gif” epidemic, which compelled our parent company Gawker Media to adjust its commenting policy. The “pending comment” system essentially allows for two comment categories on our sites: the approved comments show up below the post as soon as they’re posted, while unapproved comments show up below a “show pending” button (and include a warning: “These may contain graphic material”). Our commenters refer to the unapproved comments as “the greys”, and getting out of the greys is a privilege – but it also requires approval from a commenter or author. So in theory, abusive content has to be spotted first by the very people we’d like to keep it away from.



This may sound callous, but most writers at Gawker Media, and Jezebel writers in particular, have to build up a very thick skin to this kind of treatment. It’s in their best interest to do so quickly. Ideally, the abuse wouldn’t escalate beyond name-calling and grandstanding in comments, but of course it does every day. At this point I don’t necessarily think of “bad commenters” as the greatest psychological threat to our writers: that’s really just a catch-all term for “the endlessly shitty ways strangers can harass you on the internet”. We usually recommend against having Google alerts for our writers’ names for this reason.

More than our “bad” commenters, who usually stay in the greys or get blocked (some readers will email us with abusive accounts, which we’ll review and ban), I worry about other avenues of abuse. Unpleasant commenters just feel like a part of the job – so much so that I always address it when I’m recruiting new writers.

But it’s the Twitter trolls and targeted emails, the 4chan/Reddit threads and men’s rights sites that can tip it all over from manageable to overwhelming, and much of that happens behind the scenes. Last year our reporter Anna Merlan got “4channed” and attempted to report the incident to police; predictably, her efforts didn’t get her very far.

We’ve been discussing ways to actually publish some of the personal attacks our writers get, because seeing all of this abuse in one place might give others a better sense of the onslaught of hate we see while trying to do our jobs each day. I think taking it out of the context of “bad comments” might help bring that home.

• Emma Carmichael is editor-in-chief of Jezebel

Rob Wijnberg: Readers are enriching our reporting

The people previously known as “the audience” constitute the greatest source of knowledge, expertise and experience to which journalists have access. Yet this resource has been underutilised for more than a century and a half.

Since the 1850s, journalism has been mainly a matter of transmission. With newspapers, radio and TV, interaction between journalists and their audience was all but impossible. The internet changed all that. Online, talking back to the media is easier than ever. Suddenly, readers, viewers and listeners can be part of the conversation. People like to call this development a revolution – a game-changing democratisation of information provision.

But if you look at the way journalism still operates in 2016, you might well dispute whether any such revolution has taken place. Sure, the voice of the people can be heard louder than ever on news sites, forums and social media. But that voice isn’t always constructive, informative, or representative. The people with the biggest mouths and the strongest opinions tend to monopolise the conversation. As a result, others with genuine knowledge and expertise who could add nuance rarely feel moved to share their insights.

So the promised online revolution never really took place. In fact, more and more media outlets – often but not always traditional ones – are actually doing away with audience participation. Several big US news sites, including Reuters and The Verge, have got rid of their comments sections. The same thing is happening in the Netherlands, where I live: big dailies like De Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad have ended audience participation altogether. The weekly magazine Elsevier recently followed suit. The acting editor-in-chief, René van Rijckevorsel, says the decision to stop allowing comments felt “like losing to the hooligans after 12 years of battle”.

Online abuse: how different countries deal with it Read more

At first glance, that might seem like a logical sentiment. But have journalists really fought a battle? Have they truly done everything they can to improve the quality of comments they get?

The answer is obvious: of course not. The main problem is that reporters almost never get involved in the conversations that unfold below their articles. If the 21st century makes interactive journalism possible, newsrooms still tend to work in the same way they did in the 19th century: write, publish, go home.

Also, journalists rarely articulate their expectations. What kinds of contributions from readers, viewers and listeners would they like to see in the comments? Which questions would they like to ask their audience? What kinds of responses do they find most helpful? The public has no way of knowing.

At De Correspondent, we’re trying to change all this. First, we’re systematically engaging in dialogue with our readers. Some journalists initially saw this as a load of extra work. To which our response was: this is your job. Today, being a journalist is at least 50% about interacting with readers – asking questions, answering them, taking criticism on board, writing updates, and explicitly stating what you hope to get out of audience comments.

Second, we don’t call them “comments” but “contributions”. The world already has plenty of opinions – but knowledge, expertise and practical experience remain in short supply. Explicitly asked to contribute instead of opinionate, hundreds of readers enrich our reporting every day with fresh sources, research, experiences and well-founded criticisms. Where a piece used to end, now the story continues.

Third, those reader contributions invariably lead to new story ideas. Reporting on a Correspondent piece almost never starts without member input. Whether it’s real-life experiences of prostitution or expert insight on healthcare bureaucracy, a thousand readers will always know more than a single reporter. When a journalist uses that knowledge systematically, the sharing is rewarded. Suddenly, you find yourself surrounded not by loudmouths but by experts.

By responding to their readers, articulating their expectations and using shared knowledge in their work, journalists can change their profession in a way that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. But to do so, they must first change themselves – from being transmitters to receivers, from reporters to conversation leaders. If they’re prepared to do that, the once-promised online revolution will no longer be a distant dream. We already see the proof every day.

• Rob Wijnberg is founder and editor-in-chief of De Correspondent

Bassey Etim: We should curate more than moderate

When a news editor builds an online community, the first thing they must acknowledge is that it is impossible to make everyone happy in a comments section or on a message board.

So the question community managers and editors must ask is: who do we want to satisfy, and how?

At the New York Times, our first decision was to make the comments section as pure a reflection of the rest of the product as was reasonably possible. In the early days, we examined comments almost as if they were letters to the editor, rejecting a high percentage of incoming submissions for bad grammar and messy logic.

I wouldn’t recommend that strategy today, but experimenting with that extreme sort of moderation demonstrated some of the benefits of our modern approach. In our comments, we are looking for readers who want to join us to help broaden the perspective of our global news coverage. Our news desk is focused on creating the highest quality journalism. Similarly, our comments section is focused on facilitating the highest calibre comments and creating a space for ideas that is safe from abuse.

The vast majority of New York Times comments are moderated by a human. Nineteen people work for our community desk as editors, moderators and web developers. An added benefit of our approach is that many of our reporters now click on the comments to understand what aspects of our journalism thrill, concern or confuse our readers.

We want the highest calibre comments and a space for ideas that is safe from abuse

Most community members initially come to the Times for our editorial judgment. We are deliberate, we are careful, and we think in paragraphs. So when a reader opens our comments section, they should expect the same thing.

Our comments section launched in 2007 with a “Highlights” tab, which was later renamed “NYT Picks”. It’s a critical piece of our community efforts on a few fronts. First, it creates a more digestible version of a comments section for readers who are not comment-obsessed. It promotes a diversity that helps prevent an ideological sameness from sterilising the space. And most importantly, it signals the quality of content we are looking for to readers and commenters.

However, there is still room for improvement. The NYT is currently working on a major overhaul of its comments sections. Our dedication to the community space is increasing as we move toward a third generation of NYT comments in which our community staff offers more curation than moderation to the readers who do so much to supplement our reporting.

• Bassey Etim is community editor for the New York Times