Tree of Five Seasons in Cedar Rapids, IA. fluidicmethod/Flickr
A problem facing many online news outfits is how to handle reader conversations. Do they enable comments?
Some do and others don’t.
It’s difficult to keep things constructive. Irrelevant, offensive, spam and false comments can plague sites that do allow commenting, especially those that don’t require readers to register.
So how do we improve the participation? How do we direct user participation into a constructive debate or conversation?
These are the issues that our group of graduate journalism students have decided to look at in our 12 week new media capstone project at the Medill School of Journalism. We are fortunate to have a partner, The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, IA., to help us explore these issues. We will be talking to them and the people of Cedar Rapids in order to better understand what people want from online conversation.
As part of our project we will develop a working application that draws from the lessons we’ve learned and addresses the problems of online participation on news websites.
We’ve spent the last 2 weeks learning about the people of Cedar Rapids and eastern Iowa, the great flood of 2008, The Gazette and their vision. We had a chance to visit Cedar Rapids and speak to the staff thanks to the Gazette’s content ninja, Annette Schulte. We will be interviewing people and brainstorming over the next couple of weeks, and logging our experiences and the things we’ve learned on this site.
no comment untill now