How Mathew Ingram Manages a News Site That Gets 5,000 Comments a Day
Mathew Ingram is the Communities Editor at the Toronto-based Globe And Mail, Canada's biggest newspaper. He's a traditionally-trained reporter, but he's got years of experience blogging and using experimental new services, so he has one foot planted firmly in each world. We interviewed Mathew as part of our first premium report, The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management, where you'll find interviews and gleaned wisdom from 40 top experts in the field. The following is an excerpt from that interview that we thought would be of general interest to readers; it's about online community, transitioning from traditional to social media and it's about Twitter (what isn't these days?). We hope you enjoy it.
This is historically important stuff. "The transition from one-way to two-way media is not something that newspapers are used to doing," Ingram told us. "It's a big change."
This is such a big change and Ingram is doing such a good job of making the most of it that when Jennifer Preston was appointed the first Social Media Editor of the New York Times last month, several observers (us included) recommended that she look to Ingram's work for inspiration.
"The earliest version of community we had was comments on news stories," Ingram told us. "For anyone who runs a blog, you take that for granted; but for us, that was a big step. We were the first newspaper to do that in 2005. It crept up for us; there weren't that many people commenting. Now we're getting five, six, seven thousand comments a day. On good or bad days we can get up to ten thousand comments. [We're sure he gets help dealing with all of those!]
"I like to call that community 1.0 or 1.5, because they all just sit in a big heap at the bottom of the story. It's like a petri dish of a community; it's little micro-organisms that could become community. You see people who reply to each other, good and bad commenters who return, people who assist each other. One thing I want to encourage more is writers responding to comments and using comments as a resource. That's commenting 2.0, I think.
"Community is great because it makes people feel good, democratizes the process, but also delivers value. One of our writers wrote a story, and the comments pointed out that she only talked to one guy about one aspect of the story. She said 'I read the comments and thought F*!@ you. I wrote a story. Go write your own.' But then she admitted it was true, phoned someone else, and updated the story. For me, that's a gigantic win for us and for readers as well. That's where the feedback should be. "
"I've also seen a noticeable change in tone in comments and other interactive forums, like Coveritlive.com. As soon as someone from the paper steps in and makes a comment, the whole tone changes. If you just give people a blank wall and a spray paint can, you get a predictable outcome. But as soon as anyone says we should stick to the topic or knock off the personal attacks, it has a noticeable effect.
"Comments are the base level of interaction. I've been thinking of other ways to enhance that. We've got live blog, a wiki project, and hopefully we've got groups and forums around a particular issue.
"One of the biggest things we need to do is identify and encourage members of the community who are thoughtful, intelligent, and produce comments of value -- encouraging them to contribute more, elevating what they do and suppressing some of the noise. I'm hoping our new Web publishing system that lets people vote on comments will help with that. I'm trying to think of more ways to use the volunteer fire department principle. Identify key members, ask them to contribute more, and incentivize them. Making their comments look different, giving them a title, giving them different tools. There's no way we can moderate all these comments every day, and the only way to do it is take advantage of our community. I think a task or a goal helps a community gel."
Does the Globe use TwItter? It sure does. "I have been using it as a way to connect with people and push out features," Ingram told us. "You can pull Twitter feeds into Coveritlive.com. We did an Oscar one, an Obama visit, covered a shooting in the subway. I was looking for people commenting on Twitter on those topics, pulling in what people say. I've retweeted, approved users, or approved with hashtags. There is a surprising number of everyday people on Twitter; the Mayor of Toronto is on it. But something like that for raw information delivery is always going to be valuable. You may be touching only 1% or .1% of the population, but they are reaching ten times that many people."
Ingram's closing thoughts on the changing media landscape: "Sometimes you do things, like the policy wiki we set up to get people's input on serious issues, the first issue we got a lot of input on and the second one we got a lot less input on. It's the ghost-town phenomenon. Or they are talking about what you want them to talk about but someplace else. You can build a cool night club and tell people about it, but if people don't want to come, if they want to go to an empty warehouse, then that's what they are going to do. As a big media entity, we used to have the audience; now you have to win over an audience to pay attention to you. I don't know how to solve that one either."
Mathew Ingram is an active participant in conversations on Twitter about international media and technology; you can connect with him at @mathewi. Learn more about The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management via this link.
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This is amazing.
5k comments a day...
Often, I see a long, boring comment that has one good point, or one good sentence, or one good phrase in it. I'll call these units of commentary "thoughts." So, there are good parts and bad parts of comments, like comments from fanboys that have some good points but devolve into flames. I would like to vote up that part of the comment, while leaving the rest of the comment at the bottom where it belongs. This way, the top-ranked comments section would better represent the best of the comments. Gems in otherwise crappy comments could be seen more easily than they could before. Likewise, the good comments that rise to the top could have the fat trimmed from them.
You could highlight the part of the comment you like, then drag the highlighted text up toward the top of your screen. That would push the comment toward the top. Of course, you could still vote up the whole comment with a "like", like you do on Disqus.
Once you had the best comments and comment fragments at the top of the page, you could rearrange the order and prominence of these top comments. For example, if one person said "The Palm Pre costs too much," and another said "It should cost the same as the iPhone 3G," you could drag the second quote and drop it after the first one, putting them in a logical sequence. You could also further vote up comments that made it to the top, so people could see the cream of the cream.
Comments would then draw people who usually don't read them. They would become a kind of wiki about the story, making any story more attractive. Also, readers would be more engaged, since they would be rewarded for making the best comment and could see their comment become part of a valuable whole instead of a disjointed mess.
With comments becoming more important, comment editing options would need to expand. You should be able to format them like you can format an email, at least. They should autosave, too, as writing this very long comment has taught me.
Those strung-together comments could be like another post. It would be best if you also automatically recognized and linked to articles on the same topic, like Zemanta does, and allowed commenters to place those links in their comments. A site could even allow inline viewing of related articles from other sites, so quotes from other articles could be voted up just like the comments.
Of course, everybody would at least want credit for their comments, so you could make the excerpt automatically link to the article it's from. In the same way, excerpts from comments could link to the comments they come from. Comments and articles would be treated the same, except for their merits as determined by the community.
Each group of thoughts would show up as a thought-cloud, like a tag cloud but made up of phrases, sentences and paragraphs, and even whole stories.
The cloud at the center would be the very highest-ranked thoughts. The farther you got from the center, the worse comments would get.
This is getting long, so I'll link to my full thoughts here: http://colemanfoley.blogspot.com/2009/06/commenting-on-commenting.html
Just wanted to say, Mathew is a good friend and we've been working together rather intensively on the mesh confernence (http://meshconference.com) for the last four years.
Over this time I've seen the awakening at the Globe - no doubt due (in no small part) to Mathew's thought leadership on these matters. Sitting here today, it's incredibly inspiring to see it all bearing fruit and Mathew getting some much deserved recognition.
Thewie' - congrats; proud of you.
Marshall, this is great; what a resource. As online comm. management continues to grow as a profession, articles like these, articles about people with experience pioneering this work, will become more and more valuable. Is there a way you can tag this and similar articles so we comm managers can find them in one place?
or maybe an online hub...
Also, i'm still going through the RWW guide to online community management... It's great. Thanks for your work on that. Helping me out immensely.
Comments 2.0, i think, is also defined by those that comment on your site becoming regular advocates or ambassadors for your articles outside your title or blog.
What if they could publicly show their love for your writings on other blogs or other places on the web and draw people in who follow them around? Comment leaders will evolve and commenting itself grows out of its current playing field.
Voting on comments is one thing, but the authority of those who comment should also be determined by how many people follow their public comment and therefore landed on your blog. This adds another layer to the value of comments, cause comments brings you new readers by using the social structure outside your blog.
Even more value can be brought in by how many and which other articles the person who comments reads, loves and/or enriches with comments on the blog in question, or at any other blogs/titles in the publisher network, or the whole Web for that matter.
People with a regular commenting quality will then gain more authority because of there web 'track' record and bring more interested, quality readers to your site.
And what if we can do that automatically and intelligently?
This might be Comments 3.0, an integrated, smart comment layer on the web.
[PLUG] You might here something about this from a recommendation technology company called Kimengi(.com) soon... [/PLUG].
How @mathewi Manages a News Site That Gets 5,000 Comments a Day http://bit.ly/qbm6f [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2095746969]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 11, 2009 12:10 PM
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
KZ
Voting on comments is one thing söve , but the authority of those söve who comment should also be determined by how many people follow their public comment söve and therefore landed on your blog. This adds another layer to the value of comments, söve cause comments brings you new readers by using the social structure söve outside your blog.
Even more söve value can be brought in by how many and which other articles the person söve who comments reads, loves and/or enriches with comments on the blog in question, söve or at any other blogs/titles söve in the publisher network, or the whole Web for söve that matter.
Cool, I think you could highlight the part of the comment you like, then drag the highlighted text up toward the top of your screen. That would push the comment toward the top. Of course, you could still vote up the whole comment with a "like", like you do on Disqus.
People with a regular commenting quality will then gain more authority because of there web 'track' record and bring more interested, quality readers to your site.