How quickly do people jump to conclusions? One of the readers assumed that The Hindu is shutting down its comments section based on the column, “Engaging readers, going beyond comments” (August 22, 2016), without realising that the editorial process and the Office of the Readers’ Editor (RE) are both autonomous. The Editor’s prerogative in deciding the content of the newspaper is clearly defined. The RE comes in only post-publication. Apart from corrections and clarifications, I comment on slip-ups whenever they happen, and use the forum to think aloud on some of the challenges that confront journalism. The Editor and the editorial team weigh the ideas that emerge from the dialogue between the RE and the readers, and take a final call as they deem fit for the newspaper. This is an intricate balancing act where there is no space for overreach.
Developing toolsLast week, Nausicaa Renner, associate editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism, looked at an interesting new initiative called The Coral Project to improve the quality of the comments section. She explained how this project, “a collaboration between The New York Times , The Washington Post , and the Mozilla Foundation, funded by a $3.89 million grant from the Knight Foundation (which also funds the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism), is developing open-source tools for newsrooms everywhere to cut through the negative trolls and tap into potential of audience engagement for journalism.”
The Coral Project’s director, Andrew Losowsky, told Ms. Renner that “the conversation that we always start with, [is]: What is the role of audience in your journalistic mission? And what could the role of the audience be in your journalistic mission if you had the right tools? Some of them can answer the first, and almost no one can answer the second.” One of the tools developed by The Coral Project is called Trust. The Washington Post is currently testing a Trust beta.
According to Mr. Losowsky, Trust is meant to “highlight the good as much as punish the bad”. Ms. Renner elaborated how Trust works: “If, for example, you limit your search to commenters who have made at least 30 comments on the WaPo site, none of which have been removed by moderators and are all over 20 words long, you suddenly have a much shorter list of the best commenters. Then, you can set parameters so that these commenters bypass moderation and their comments are automatically featured. Commenters who tend to be flagged, on the other hand, can be sent straight to pre-moderation. Publishers can specify, down to the number of Tweets, the threshold at which they want to moderate.”
The Coral Project’s website has an interesting post by Rob Malda, the creator of Slashdot , on the arrival of trolls. He wrote: “They [trolls] took many forms, ranging from posting material that might be entertaining, perpetuating running gags and memes that bonded the community together, to malicious users who merely incited hostility with oppositional viewpoints or offensive language, and users who explicitly aimed to break the system in a technical way by flooding a forum with a waterfall of posts that drowned out the real material. These attacks became an unyielding force, pushing Slashdot developer time away from its core mission of the dissemination and discussion of nerd news. We were forced to play referee between users, some of whom were actively dishonest about their role in the system.”
This has precisely been my concern too. What can be done to retain the focus of the newspaper on its core mission and not permit dishonest users to deflect and lead conversations to a dead end?
The Coral team says that they “want to give publishers the ability to better understand their contributors and control the level of discourse on their sites; empower contributors to manage their identities and data; and provide readers with a more productive discussion about current events.” They make a crucial differentiation between a commenting platform and tools for communities around journalism. They are clear that they are not building a commenting platform and that they don’t treat comments as being isolated from the rest of the journalistic process.
Ms. Renner is not sure whether The Coral Project will be able to drive news sites away from shutting down their own commenting systems. She thinks that The Coral Project only provides the tools. “How successful newsrooms are in connecting with readers has to do with the initiative that news organisations themselves take, whether they are proactive in building audiences or hand over commenting to social media platforms where they have little control,” she writes.
The good news for The Hindu ’s digital team is that The Coral Project is inviting anyone who is interested in building better communities around journalism. The project is committed to providing a safe and open space for all. Its community guidelines rest on four pillars: be supportive of each other; criticise ideas, not people; flag bad behaviour; and follow the rules. The aim of the project is to create software that publishers can use to better connect with their community. I believe that The Hindu ’s digital team must get involved in this project to make its interactivity with the readers more meaningful and mutually beneficial.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
