Crunchberry Project

Worlds Fair 1893

After four weeks deep in designing and developing new ways to approach commenting and conversation around news, we have an interesting challenge. How do we show off our work? As we have discussed in previous posts, our goal for this project was to look at ways to improve the quality of conversation on news Web sites. We’ve developed three ways to facilitate conversation – Question & Answer style comments, short format, tweet-like comments, and Letters to the Editor. And we have built all of these systems to integrate with Facebook. Over the next couple weeks we will focus on polish, and more importantly, developing a way to demonstrate what we’ve built.

There are a few ways that we can show off. We could build a news Web site, host content and attract viewers to participate in our community. We could try to export our app by making it embeddable into other websites. We could release the code and let others use it in existing sites.

We will definitely release the source code, but we can’t rely on others to show off our stuff. So in light of our time constraints, we have decided to build a simple news website. Something with local Cedar Rapids news that will allow interested people interact and discuss the news with other readers and Facebook friends.

So what should our local news website look like? How should we apply our commenting systems? Short-format twitter comments on entertainment and sport stories? Letters to the Editor for hot button issues? Questions and Answers on investigative stories? Some combination of the three on all stories?

These are some of the questions we would like to answer this week.

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Luckily, we didn’t have to. 

There are many sites out there that let users create profiles—but how many social networks and profiles can one person maintain? We decided not to do what someone else is already doing well, and instead utilize the social networking power that is Facebook, or rather, the ability to relate news to your social network using Facebook Connect.

From the Facebook developers blog: “Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.”

This week I am busy designing a system for how comments a user makes on our site will appear on their Facebook profile. Again, not reinventing the wheel here. The Facebook developers wiki makes it pretty clear what the accepted norms are. 

The system I am designing for The Gazette Online this week is very similar to the entertainment celebrity news and gossip site, The Insider. The Insider was one of the first sites to integrate with the Facebook Connect system. Users can choose to add comments they make on The Insider to their Facebook profile wall feed in either a one line, short or full format. 

The good news is that if Facebook approves our implementation of Facebook Connect, the Gazette would likely be one of the first news sites to use the system. But that is a big IF. Facebook has said Connect will roll out November 30, but it’s anyone’s guess if they will hit that deadline, who they will approve and how it will be decided. All we can do is wait, design, develop and hope that the brains behind Facebook Connect like what they see.

We Americans like to judge things. We vote for a new leader every fourth year. Pick favorite teams in baseball. And befriend only those deemed popular in middle school. So it was bound to happen. After years of judging each other, we took the game online, and ratings were born. 

There’s binary – the Ebert model – a quick thumbs up/thumbs down. Ratings done by assigning points or stars. Or there’s the more complex. Like the Topix model where users can judge comments as “brilliant,” “nuts,” “clueless,” “racy,” and a whole host of other descriptions. 

Topix

In our weekly design team planning meeting we decided we couldn’t build commenting structures without addressing ratings. But the tricky part is building a system that will not just be a copy of existing models, but rather, be uniquely targeted at each commenting structure we have built. This means we must have a separate model for the question and answer structure, short format and this week’s letters to the editor format. 

Josh and I have made some progress on a rating system for the question and answer commenting structure we designed a few weeks ago. 

We didn’t like the idea of rating questions, at least in the traditional sense. As we are told often throughout life, there are no bad questions and we don’t want to discourage question asking by judging people for their inquiries. We are, however, designing a rating system for questions where the most popular questions would be highlighted. After a question is asked users with the same question can click a box that says, “I have this question too!” This will give priority to the questions readers most want answered, and possibly motivate the reporter to further investigate the story until the answer is found. 

For ratings on answers, we are combining the Topix model with traditional binary commenting. Users click either a thumbs up or thumbs down icon to vote an answer as good or bad. When users click the thumbs up icon, they are given a drop down menu of choices for how to positively rate the comment including “interesting,” “agree,” “helpful,” “insightful,” “informative,” etc. Conversely, when users click the thumbs down icon they are given a drop down menu of choices for how they can negatively rate the comment, including “disagree,” “offensive,” “off-topic,” “incorrect,” “rude,” etc. 

This system is not entirely brand new, it’s not off the wall, but it just might work. It maintains the speed and ease of use of binary ratings, while providing a little more insight into the content of the comments so the user can decide which comments are worth their time. 

While designs for that rating system move forward, Stuart and I are still busy at work designing a rating system for the letters to the editor model. We are struggling with a way to make ratings innovative and uniquely tied to this commenting structure, without adding too many bells and whistles.

What do you think? How would you want to rate letters to the editor? We’re all ears – ready to judge your suggestions and determine the winner.

This morning I interviewed Kerry Lauerman, of Salon’s Letters and Open Salon, as part of our industry research.

Salon’s Letter to the Editor comment structure stands out in a crowd. Their system, adopted in October 2005, is an innovative approach to a trusted and familiar model. Letters to the Editor are as integral to the history of newspapers as obituaries and wedding announcements.

Salon

Their model is simple: user’s must go through a quick registration and then can write a headline and post their letter. Editors highlight the best letters. Readers can choose to read only those marked by editors, or can see through every letter submitted. 

The letters to the editor structure is one that Stuart and I have considered in our design process, one that we may decide to pursue in the coming weeks. One concern I had before speaking to Mr. Lauerman was that the barrier to entry would be too high. The phrase “letters to the editor” implies a more intelligent, thoughtful reply, as opposed to “comment” which can suggest a snap judgment. It sounds like a great idea – promoting intelligence over outbursts, but to meet the goal of increased community engagement every effort should be made to encourage comments, not discourage them, right?

An example letter

In the world of page views, tallies of registered users and counting clicks, it seems like the focus online is on getting a volume of comments, rather than striving for intelligent discourse. We worry about having too high a barrier of entry to commenting, but maybe that is not a productive concern. 

Lauerman said he doesn’t care if people are turned off from commenting by their letters system.  

“We never worry. If anything we worry it isn’t high enough of a barrier,” Lauerman said. “Our system is targeted at someone who wants to write something thoughtful, because that’s what we’re looking for.”

Lauerman wondered if anyone truly benefits from commenting systems where users can spout off without restraint.

“You are not building anything useful if people are just using it as a place to pop off anonymously,” he said. 

Former Salon editor, Scott Rosenberg, in a letter dated Jan. 30, 2006, said they believe that signed letters reflect a more considered thinking. 

“We know that some of you might be thinking, ‘Gee, when future potential employers are Googling my name, do I really want them to see this rant?’” he wrote. “Maybe that’s simply good motivation to write something that you’ll be proud of. If you think you won’t want to stand by your letter years from now, you might reconsider whether you want to post it at all.”

I like that Salon has the attitude that they want to receive quality letters, or none at all. Just because we want to get more people interacting online does not mean we have to set the bar so low that anyone can jump in. News organizations can still maintain their sense of intelligence and worth. Perhaps if more news organizations took this message to heart we would have more intelligent discourse and less cover stories featuring Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie.

We’re at the point in the project where it is finally time to decide once and for all what we are going to do. We’ve done research. We’ve spoken to our audience. We’ve identified the needs. Now we need to know how we will charge ahead.

We all came up with ideas for what might work. While our ideas were varied, by the end of the day they had settled into two camps. Either we would build a niche website specifically targeted at a need as expressed by our audience (20-35 year olds in Cedar Rapids) OR we would focus on the way people interact with the news, with the goal of building conversations around the news.

We found there was a fundamental difference between meeting our class goals and meeting the big goal. Our class goals consists of things like: we want to build something new and innovative, something people will talk about and use, something that will help get us jobs. Our big goal is to build and strengthen interactions between 20 and 35 year olds in Cedar Rapids. We had a tough time figuring out one product that would meet both of these goals.

We split into groups. One team was charged with creating a niche website that would inherently address a need in the community, but would be something that hasn’t been done before, and would also take into account the unwritten goal of tying this project to the improvement of journalism. The other team was to create something new and innovative that would also take into account the needs of our community.

Enter Your Crew and Pie Social (working titles).

“Your Crew: Connecting friends, connecting family” is a niche website for young families in Cedar Rapids with a mission of strengthening family connections in the community by giving families in Cedar Rapids the very best news about what’s happening, where to go and how to have fun together. It would involve such features as an interactive calendar, social networking, a tie to local news, and a plethora of community created content such as reviews, how-to videos, recipes, craft projects and more.

In the end, we chose the Pie Social model. QuintanaRoo/Flickr

The mission of “Pie Social: What are you reading?” is to make the community of interested people around local news and information visible and accessible and to encourage participation through ease of use and structure. Much of this idea has yet to be defined but the super-features in the works right now involve transparency, making connections between users based on what they read. This model will likely involve Facebook integration and improved systems of commenting.

Both presentations were incredibly strong and very persuasive arguments could be made in favor of pursuing either project. In the end, it came down to a vote. We will be pursuing the “Pie Social” model. And while we don’t know exactly what it will look like or how we will pull it off, we are relatively confident that it is the more experimental and innovative model of the two options.

Our professor, Rich Gordon, made a great point before he left the room so we students could debate until a winner was chosen and the white smoke emerged. He said that media companies, bound by tradition and financial constraints, often have to pick the safe model, the model that is proven to work. As journalism graduate students we have the ability to experiment, be wrong, mess up, fail, but hopefully succeed and come up with something media companies don’t have the freedom to pursue.

What do you think of our decision?