Tim Akimoff, digital manager at the Missoulian (Steel Brooks/MJR)

Web comments provoke debate

by Chris Arneson

In recent years the emergence of online news media has contributed to a decline of traditional print news media, most notably newspapers. Newsrooms across the nation have made extraordinary staff cuts, and many newspapers have slashed the number of pages of daily publications in an effort to stem the bleeding of plunging advertising revenue. But as the shift toward online media has closed one door for journalism — the printed daily newspaper — it has opened another for interactive online media.

Interactive media, most notably interactive reader comment threads, may be the opportunity print journalism needs to reel advertising dollars back in, and if done right may increase the news value for readers, too. But the shift to a profitable online business model poses challenges to the traditional role of the newspaper, and has faced opposition from those inside and outside the newsroom.

Tim Akimoff, the newly promoted digital manager of the Missoulian newspaper, has watched and helped in launching commenting systems at three newspapers: The Oregonian, the Statesman Journal and the Missoulian. At all three, he says, editors and reporters alike opposed allowing comments on newspaper websites.

“Here, nobody wanted it,” he says. “There’s a sense of — there’s a wall, sort of, between the journalists and the community. It’s one that I’ve really struggled to overcome because the new journalism really has to be much more in the community.”

Akimoff says editors, especially those who believe strongly in an independent newsroom and want to uphold the traditional idea of newspapers, oppose adjusting to the changing role of the media in the online age. Still, the traditionalists will eventually have to embrace newspapers’ changing reality.

Says Akimoff, “Sherry (Devlin, the Missoulian’s editor) is one of those people where she’s got that kind of old -school value of what a newspaper is. And I love that. She so protects the newspaper more so than any other editor I’ve ever worked with. But I think she can also see where it’s changing and where she can’t hold back the flood tide that’s kind of overwhelming us ... Other editors I’ve worked with would absolutely have it stop. They would do everything they can to keep it from continuing.”

Even some bloggers who thrive on online media oppose allowing comments on their websites. In a 2006 blog post, Seth Godin, a blogger who writes on online media issues, explained why he doesn’t allow comments on any of his six websites, saying for a single blogger, reading through and moderating comments takes too much time. Moreover, it changes a writer’s perception of his or her audience. “It permanently changes the way I write,” he wrote. “Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters ... so, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.”

Sree Sreenivasan, dean of Student Affairs at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, says the benefits of reader participation outweigh the drawbacks. It gets people engaged in the news, he says.

“Lots of people want to take action when they read a story,” he said in a 2007 interview with USA Today. “In the old days if you were upset about something, you could tell one person at the water cooler. Now you can forward it to 100 friends and say, ‘We need to do something.’”

Akimoff agrees. If newspapers want to remain a relevant factor in any community, they need to be able to keep up with the technologies of the day. With Web services like Twitter.com, Facebook.com and Craigslist.com, newspapers have to adjust to remain relevant. Today, someone can go to Twitter or Facebook to announce their engagement or wedding. Someone wanting to sell a car can post it on Craigslist for free, so why bother with paid classifieds?

Moreover, cuts in newsroom staff leave publications desperate for material to fill their pages, both online and in print. Community-submitted material can solve that problem, Akimoff says. Traditional reporters want to keep a separation between the newsroom and the community to preserve a sense of journalistic objectivity, but if reporters don’t make an effort to be part of the community, readers will just depend on Facebook and Twitter for their entertainment and news.

This is where comments come in. Comment strings provide an opportunity for newspapers to connect with the community. They offer the public a forum in which to debate political and social issues. They can also add information to a story that the reporter may have overlooked or provide a tip for a reporter to follow up on.

Akimoff recalls a suicide case he was reporting on for the Missoulian. He couldn’t reach any of the victim’s relatives until he posted a story about the incident online. Shortly after, someone wrote a comment on the story mentioning the victim’s sister.

“I actually found his sister and ended up giving her a call,” he says. “She just tore me a new one, but that was an immense value to me as a reporter.”

Despite their value as a reporting tool, comments can also make reporters’ jobs difficult. Just after The Oregonian took its commenting system online, Akimoff posted a story about a bilingual program at Oregon State University to help acclimate Hispanic students and their families. What followed was a barrage of racially derogatory comments and charges of biased reporting by the publication.

“I could not believe the stuff people wrote, just directed at me personally for supposedly supporting this system, and it was an eye opener,” he says.

Comments prompted personal attacks at other Oregonian writers as well. One Hispanic reporter in particular became the target of racial slurs.

“It didn’t matter what it was, she was always personally attacked in almost every comment,” Akimoff says. “It was the fact that she was Hispanic and that somehow, she was an advocate for every Mexican to be on welfare and get citizenship or get their driver’s license. She was one of the more fair and balanced reporters I’ve ever worked with. She didn’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt. She always checked citizenship papers; no white reporter would go into a Mexican’s home and ask for their citizenship papers.”

Story comments have a tendency to attract extreme social and political views, especially within the first few months of going online. At each of the three newspapers Akimoff watched and enabled comments, he says about a dozen people posted prolifically, and almost all of their comments were bigoted or obscene.

“They’re just ignorant people who just love to spout off,” he says. “And they give the appearance of being a huge crowd of people, so you start to think, ‘Wow, are we the only people in this community who feel this way?’” But as time went on at each of the publications, more users signed up with the papers’ commenting systems, and eventually the obscene comments were outnumbered by reader comments that offered insight and a balanced range of views. Even so, at the Missoulian, years after initially launching comments, reporters still become frustrated with incendiary or inaccurate reader comments.

Moreover, editors fear online comments could put publications at risk for lawsuits, or could offend readers and advertisers. For Akimoff, this is one of the biggest challenges to developing an effective advertising model for comments, which could be one of the Missoulian’s best advertising resources.

Newspapers across the nation weigh an array of legal and practical variables in deciding whether to mediate comments, permit user moderation, or allow completely unmoderated comments. So far, no publication has developed the perfect system, but editors and publishers see the financial potential of comment pages.

Akimoff says the most effective section of a newspaper to advertise on is the op-ed page. It is one of the most widely read, and it attracts readers from every demographic. However the op-ed page is also one of the most difficult pages to sell advertising on, because businesses are afraid they will be associated with a controversial or negative editorial.

This rings doubly true for advertising on comment sections of newspaper websites. Advertisers are even more hesitant about advertising next to comment strings that can often contain more controversial statements than on even the most extreme editorial opinions. But comment pages also have some of the highest time-on-site statistics of any page on newspaper websites.

In the online advertising world, advertisers are billed by page views and click-throughs, with page views generating the majority of online advertising revenue. A page view is simply a tally of the number of times a page with a company’s advertisement is viewed by a Web user, no matter how briefly. But since advertisers want to get the most value for their advertising budget, they want to be sure that visitors spend sufficient time on a page to notice their advertisements. This is where time-on-site comes in. Missoulian.com averages 6.5 minutes of time-on-site, while most popular blog sites average 13 minutes — that’s Akimoff’s goal.

But content alone will not keep readers on a site for that long. To get those kind of numbers, Akimoff says, the Missoulian would have to get users on comment strings talking back and forth.

A commenting scheme that increases time-on-site will also increase click-throughs, Akimoff says. In a click-through, a visitor doesn’t just see the advertisement, but actually clicks on it, which usually sends them to an advertiser’s marketing website. Just as advertisers reason that the longer a reader stays on one page, the better chance he has of noticing an advertisement, there is also a better chance he will click on the advertisement. Right now, the Missoulian only has a .6 percent click-through rate. Though relatively low, it still generates “thousands and thousands of dollars depending on where that ad is running,” Akimoff says.

Even with low time-on-site, enabling comments on a newspaper website can dramatically increase the number of page views. Unmoderated commenting has shown to be the most effective tool at increasing page views, based on Akimoff’s experiences at the Missoulian.

Steve Semelsberger, of Pluck, a social media Web developer who contracts with USA Today, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, estimated in a recent interview with the Chronicle that comments can increase page views by between 5 and 15 percent. (If you look closely, you can see the “Powered by Pluck” logo next to the comment boxes of more than 250 news websites).

Despite the statistics, Akimoff says, it will still take time to develop a truly effective interactive comment model. Traditionalist editors will have to adjust to the idea that the news media is changing. But if done right, online publications can provide more valuable news resources to readers. It also takes time for the community to embrace a new style of journalism. Some readers are anxious about exposing themselves to commenters and are afraid to post a comment on a story, Akimoff says.

The solution to all of these commenting issues is for online publications to fully embrace and integrate with online social media. A comprehensive commenting strategy that encourages reporters to respond to reader comments, like those at the Washington Post and New York Times would add substantial news value to a publication.

Moreover, an unmoderated commenting system that depends on user votes and post flagging would relieve many of the legal and practical concerns of publishers.

The ideal situation, Akimoff says, is community-led moderation, in which users could report a malicious commenter. After numerous reports from readers, the site administrator would be notified and could review the content and choose whether to block the reported commenter. The Missoulian has already successfully implemented this on its community blog website, Speakupmissoula.com.

A community-led moderation commenting model would also allow for immediate commenting and facilitate dialogue between multiple readers, as readers would stay on the site longer, engaging in conversation through the comment thread. This would increase time-on-site numbers and generate more advertising revenue.

If the Missoulian were able to effectively implement such a system, it would be the type of business model the print media needs to remain solvent.

“Readers could hypothetically be there all day long,” Akimoff says. “Which would be exactly the way I would want it. I’d love to have half an hour, 45 minute time-on-site times.”

For now, Akimoff and Web editors at other publications are still talking in hypotheticals and experimenting. Akimoff says people need to remember that online publications are still young.

“It’s hard for me to believe that I was at The Oregonian when they started posting online,” Akimoff says. “It feels like we’ve been doing that for decades, but really we haven’t. Very few newspapers have been. Some of the longest are 10 years now, whereas most are within the last three to five years.”

Still the clock is ticking for the newspaper industry to find an effective online model.