It's official
As JR announced on Saturday, I'm going to embark on turning the News & Record's online presence into a public square, using principles of open-source journalism, as soon as I get one or two other things off my plate.
As he said, my "early efforts" will be to develop interactivity, forums, communities of place and of interest. I'll also be trying to break down artificial boundaries between N&R staff and readers by working to develop more staff and reader blogs and finding other ways to get more reader-produced content -- stories and media -- online.
That's an environment so target-rich as to be almost bewildering. And I'm a content guy, not a tech guy. (My c0ding skillz aren't mad. They're not even grumpy.)
So while I'm clearing my decks, let me lay the cornerstone for the public square by throwing this question out for discussion: Of the various formats for online discussion -- for argument's sake, let's say a discussion that could be initiated by readers OR N&R staff -- what format (blog, threaded messaging, etc.) do you like best and why? For the techies among you, is there any particular program for managing such discussion forums that you especially like? Any particular features we ought to be insisting upon?
Hit the comments link and let me know.
Thanks! Let's get to work.
Comments (6)
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From my observations, the blog format works best to spark conversation. There is something about when the author makes an actual statement, or offers an opinion, that causes people to want to respond with 'whoa... that's not right' or a simple 'amen, I agree' and all points in between..
As I have noted many times, if a blogger, or someone in charge of an online thread poses an overt 'what do you think' solicitation for responses, everything goes quiet. I don't know why that is, but the phenomenon is real
Question and answer sessions just don't get the ball rolling like when I, or any blogger, states the news he wants to impart then offer his/her take on it.
I realize how problematic it will be for reporters to state any real opinion, but an independent blogger will have no such reservations, nor will Alan Johnson and his cohorts blogs when they get up and running.
Anyway... my vote is 'do it blog-style', that is if the idea is to start a conversation. Perhaps, if the responses get to be unwieldy you might want to stand at the ready with a way to branch the conversation out into various 'threads'.
What else?
Posted on January 10, 2005 11:37 AM
Slashdot uses a comment (what David calls a blog-style) style. Of course your issues with comment style is that it can get REALLY annoying to search through and hopefully you drive a large database to do it on since it can get unwieldy. The other style for discussion is a forum based like PHPBB2.
I've also found that coding it from scratch probably isn't the best solution always. You might want to take a look at Drupal, or even Xoops, where it's modular based so you can add and choose what you want. That's the beauty of Content Management Systems.
Posted on January 10, 2005 2:10 PM
If you caught "The State Of Things" today you heard your name mentioned, but their guests-- a couple of smalltown NC. newspaper publishers-- pointed out a couple of simple facts that might lighten the load:
1. While not still true today, historicly it's been too easy for newspapers to make money so newspapers were always resistant to change. Now you're forced to change like it or not.
2. We learn best through our failures and newspapers need a few failures to learn from.
Not that I want to see you fail, but please take the bumps in stride and don't give up on this project.
Posted on January 10, 2005 7:10 PM
PS. I hate threads as I always get tangled up in them.
Posted on January 10, 2005 7:11 PM
What you have for blogs now seems fine.
But, whatever you do, make it easy to reverse publish the information. It would be cool to actually put some of the stuff online BACK in print... (maybe a "best of our blogs" thing on page 2 each day or something)
Posted on January 10, 2005 10:37 PM
Key, I think, is to offer both synchronous and asynchronous conversations. Threaded message boards and chat rooms. Blogs and instant messaging. Asynchronous tends to be a bit more thoughtful and encourages longer entries. Synchronous is more reactionary and more concise but is immediate. Both are valuable.
Posted on January 11, 2005 10:08 AM