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| The Washington Post tries a new weapon to fight the trolls: humans Posted: 01 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST
Reader comments at the Washington Post website have shot up 142 percent since the paper switched to the Echo platform in March 2011, according to Jon DeNunzio, the Post’s interactivity editor. The community is growing so fast that Post staffers will start getting more personally involved, starting now. And not just the six people dedicated to comments full-time — the whole newsroom. “In recent weeks,” DeNunzio wrote in a blog post, “we have had more than 40 reporters post in comment streams, and that number will continue to grow.” Comments from post staffers are badged with “WP Staff” insignia, helping reinforce trust among readers.
It seems to defy conventional wisdom at many American newspapers, where reporters rarely appear in comments. “There’s a school of thought in the newspaper world that since we buy ink by the barrel, then we ought to let readers have their say without our trying to have the last word,” media watcher Dan Kennedy told me. “I think that mentality has crossed over into online comments. I don’t know how many newspapers actually forbid their journalists from jumping into the comments, but I think it’s fair to say that many of them discourage it.” (And many journalists don’t need any encouragement to avoid diving in — they’re happy to stay above it all.) “The interactivity team here started taking a more active approach to getting reporters into the comments late last year because we were pretty sure it could help the comment threads — and the journalism,” DeNunzio told me in an email.
He continued: “I think reporters have gotten involved because they understood that there was value in doing so…We have not run into ‘cultural issues’ in getting participation — it’s been really gratifying, really, to get so many positive reactions from our colleagues.” For example, in a front-page story in December, Donna St. George reported that black students in the D.C. area were suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites. That story attracted 3,736 comments, more than 2,000 of those by 9 o’clock in the morning. With prodding from the interactivity team, St. George struck while the iron was hot. She began engaging commenters directly and by name. She posed follow-up questions. The rapid-fire debate made the comments section something of an online chat. At one point, St. George invited one of the researchers quoted in her story to join the discussion, figuring he was better equipped to answer some questions than she. St. George reflected on the experience in a blog post:
By getting involved, reporters can also help fend off rumors, speculation, and flame wars. Last week the Post covered the guilty plea of former Marine Corps Reservist Yonathan Melaku, who shot at the Pentagon and other military buildings in 2010 while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” according to federal prosecutors. So…yeah, you can imagine that comment thread. Reporter Josh White posted this five hours after his story went up:
“He also mentioned a story,” DeNunzio recalled of White, “in which the commenters had assumed the subject was black. He responded in the comments saying, in essence, ‘Not that it matters, but the subject was white.’ As you can imagine, that really helps stop a whole vein of racially-tinged comments.” The Post is making other changes to its comment-moderation workflow. DeNunzio said they will reward high-quality commenters with badges (a feature launched last spring) more frequently, ban the trolls more aggressively, and bulk up the list of terms that gets a comment auto-deleted. The interactivity team also created a dedicated email address, comments@washingtonpost.com, for readers to direct questions (Why was I deleted?) and complaints (n0m3ercy is breaking teh rules!). The impact of these changes — the quality of the dialog — can be hard to measure. One metric to watch might be whether the number of “flagged” and auto-deleted comments goes up or down in the next few months. Nevertheless, the tone of a discussion softens up a lot when humans get involved. “I can say from personal experience that when I have gone into threads to explain how our comments work or help users with questions/issues they might have, the tone changes simply because the user realizes someone from The Post is listening,” DeNunzio said. |
| Hello Tokyo! The Guardian experiments in immersive video with Condition One Posted: 01 Feb 2012 06:30 AM PST The Guardian is launching a new experiment in video, partnering with video company Condition One to release full-immersion travel guides. Don’t just read about life in Shibuya — stand in the middle of it! David Levene’s Tokyo, released as part of the Guardian’s Tokyo travel guide, offer what you might call a 180-degree look at the sights of Japan’s largest city. Of course, good video aims for an immersive experience, a combination of shots, pacing, and editing that gives viewers a sense of a place just short of smelling the air for themselves. But in this case, the guides go further: Through Condition One’s technology, iPad users can tilt, pan, and pivot in their surroundings. What the tech does, essentially, is let a viewer figure out what’s happening just off frame, either to the side or above the camera. Which can be kind of handy for a travel video, offering up a kind of live-action Google Street View effect, where you can get a handle not just on what you’re looking at but its place in larger surroundings. Condition One was originally conceived by documentarian Danfung Dennis to create video from areas of conflict. But as the Guardian’s experiment shows, it’s a product with broader applications for other kinds of journalism. Over gChat, Guardian travel writer Benji Lanyado told me city-guide videos felt like a perfect fit for a technology aimed at giving people a richer viewing experience: “Immersive, armchair travel.” Once you get past the basics of “how much will this hotel cost,” what most of us want in city guides is a general sense of what a place is like. Levene’s four videos are relatively brief (the longest maxes out at 2:50) that give glimpses of daily life, like the bustle of the Shibuya street crossing or a ride on Tokyo’s Metro. As the video rolls, a viewer gets the sense they’re on foot and can look wherever their eye takes them — say, a billboard on a skyscraper overhead, or a man dressed in a panda costume just out of view. (An image that, by itself, justifies the technology.) Using a limited license on the Condition One software, the Guardian was able to have the video shot and edited (in Final Cut Pro, Lanyado says) before sending it off to Condition One for encoding. Lanyado wasn’t able to tell me much more about the process, but it’s been reported that most Condition One videos are shot using video-capable DSLR cameras. The videos live on their own branded channel within the Condition One iPad app, which has several other videos, including a look at an Occupy D.C. protest from The Washington Post. The viewer doesn’t have total freedom — you can’t look behind you, for instance, and you’re can’t just glance some interesting cross street and decide to wander down it. But you do get to take in as much scenery as the normal field of vision allows. “We’re in a recession…I can’t afford to go to the Solomon Islands,” Lanyado said. “But seeing some immersive video of the Solomon Islands could certainly help scratch the itch.” Think of it as a digital world’s fair. The videos are part of a broader experiment by the Guardian in what a truly interactive city guide could look like. One other cool bit they’ve added to the guide is a history of video games and gaming culture in Japan, supplemented with playable versions of classic games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. Yes, as of today, you can chomp ghosts at your desk at work through a British newspaper. It’s all part of the Guardian’s push toward increased experimentation; you may be familiar with some of their other efforts like nOtice and Guardian TagBot. Like all of the paper’s beta projects, Lanyado said the Tokyo videos are there to elicit a response from viewers, to see if it’s something worth taking further. Using Condition One could make a lot of sense for news organizations who want to get more out of their video features, and giving viewers a way to engage with their media in new ways could be a good investment. Of course, investment is the right word when talking about video — multimedia projects can be costly for newsrooms, but they can also generate a return over a longer period of time than a straight news story. (Presumably, interest in Tokyo street pandas will only increase over time.) The tech requirements for the full experience — an iPad plus the Condition One app — will probably limit the audience for this experiment initially. But in the meantime, Lanyado said, the paper is invested in trying new things. “I can’t see us reaching some kind of perfect way to deliver news any time soon,” Lanyado said. “So in the meantime we need to experiment as much as possible to find out what works, and what doesn’t.” |
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