The British newspaper, The Guardian, is among the most sophisticated of all news media in the digital space, so any contemplation or decision on its part deserves attention.
The news organization is now evaluating how its journalists should participate in comment threads. This shouldn't surprise anyone --- once journalists were expected to blog, it was not unexpected they'd have to engage ---- but not many outlets are that far down the road. So the Guardian's deliberations on this front will be worth studying.
The Guardian will soon unveil a new Pluck-based platform to widen the interactivity between creators and audience, and there are still many questions from the newsroom's journalists on how plucky they can be in participating, how to use those threads for news, and largely how to ensure the venerable brand is preserved.

 


Comments

benny lava

Sun, 11 May 2008 23:16:16

"it was not unexpected they'd have to engage"

At the risk of seeming like a jerk, I'll refer you to the example in my overlong comments a few posts ago. A lack of authentic engagement can be worse than not engaging at all. If the interest is in better collaborative content, then engage. I don't think big media is in this business, and will always suffer in comparison to independents and be a dollar short and a day late wrt the evolving rules of the game.

True engagement will also mean journos and editors having to defend their stories. Good for quality and truth and all that, but a real timewaster that doesn't necessarily make money. Again, I'm not sure big media is really in this game, and dabbling brings risks to the brand (again, jerkily, my previous example). Better to pretend to be about truth and integrity than to actually have to wade into the messy business of pursuing it by mediating dialogue.

"creators and audience"

And there, I think, is the chronic misunderstanding. Commenters don't think themselves an "audience", and a media outlet (or a blogger) that treats them that way will do themselves more harm than good. They're not commenting because they want to listen, but because they want to speak.

 

Kirk LaPointe

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:44:05

A couple of misunderstandings here:
1. I do differentiate between creators and audience, and I put commentators in the creators category. The audience is the audience, plain and simple.
2. Engagement has to take some shape, It can't just be a free-for-all, because many journalists are expected not to weigh in with personal views in reporting. This is not a big media/little media issue at all. If anything, larger media have more time to discuss decisions, so I'd expect over the time ahead to see many more organizations opening themselves much more than they have.
3. I'd be careful about casting claims and positioning big and so-called independent media when it comes to collaboration and engagement. Culturally and financially, big media invest much more in their communities in journalism and in good works (sponsorship of events, for example). They are far more collaborative at an organizational level than meets the eye.

 



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