Hi: I'm Doreen Marchionni (Ph.D. '09, Missouri School of Journalism). I'll be your intergalactic pilot on this journey through my dissertation. Send whiskey, please.
A few thoughts in response to the ongoing debate between Joe Wilcox and John Gruber about blog commenting (see samples of their respective posts here and here.)
My doctoral research found online news consumers respond positively to stories that result from deep collaboration between ordinary people and journalists, the stories apparently seeming fuller and more complete with citizen help. How a journalist — or perhaps a blogger — conducts that collaboration is a separate issue.
I tested crowd-sourcing via Twitter and old-fashioned interaction via e-mail and face-to-face, among other styles of communication, in controlled experiments. Regardless of how the collaboration was done, audience members just plain liked the interaction. The one surprising catch: If you do conduct journalism as a conversation, you absolutely must tell readers in your stories that ordinary people helped out. If you don’t explicitly say this, it goes over readers’ heads, and you don’t get the benefit of increased perceived credibility and expertise.
The question of whether to collaborate via comments and/or other venues, such as e-mail or social-media, is important, but be careful about making any assumptions about them. As I’ve said before, what works in one market or field for one news organization or individual blogger might not work in another.
If you do allow comments on all or most stories, I beg you to go into it with the clearest — and hopefully purest — intentions and leadership. Use your audience to moderate the snot out of the thing and get involved yourself. The more an author/moderator is perceived to be actively involved, the less likely the trolls will run roughshod.
I’m still developing the curriculum for a conversation class I’ll be teaching this fall. But I already know one core assignment will require students to draft a commenting protocol to guide news organizations and bloggers through the thicket. I’ll post the best of the protocols here, so stay tuned.
The irony about pitched battles over commenting, of course, is that they flourish under fundamentally democratic practices. And those practices tell us that few things in life are black or white, good or bad, so listen and learn from those around you. It might well be that listening is a lot tougher than commenting.
