{"id":16916,"date":"2016-05-07T10:47:58","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T14:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=16916"},"modified":"2016-05-07T10:47:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T14:47:58","slug":"would-you-care-to-comment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2016\/05\/07\/would-you-care-to-comment\/","title":{"rendered":"Would you care to comment?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few weeks the NCPR three-person digital team has been doing a lot of head scratching and a certain amount of soul searching. We have the feeling that we are spending a lot of time on tasks that don’t serve the audience well, aren’t spending enough time on some tasks that could make our work a lot better, and don’t have enough brain bandwidth left over to be creating the awesome and the new, which we feel should be “task one.”<\/p>\n

The usual way of looking at a situation like this is to do a cost\/benefit analysis and to prioritize tasks accordingly, or to look for efficiencies that can improve the outcome.<\/p>\n

\"Photo:

Photo: Scott Ableman<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

Which brings me to NCPR’s longstanding policy of inviting listener comment on all the stories we produce or bring into our website from other sources. The cost side is easy for us to see. Looking just at the stories now on our front page from the last couple days there are about 250 listener comments. These comments total over 25,000 words in length, about half the length of the average novel, and much longer than the combined verbiage of all the stories concerned.<\/p>\n

Each comment has to be read and reviewed by someone on the digital team for purposes of moderation and for information. And this tally doesn’t count the comments that are made 24\/7 on the many stories not on the home page at the moment, and also doesn’t count the comments that appear on the social media posts that share all these stories. And it doesn’t count the daily kilo of commercial or pernicious spam.<\/p>\n

Eight more comments have come into my inbox while I have been writing this post.\u00a0The task as it is being done now is, in a word, unsupportable by our small staff. Leaving aside the costs of managing frequent incivility, semi-private “flame wars,” irrelevancies, and data of dubious provenance, just the task of consuming the content of comments occupies more labor than it returns in value to our organization. A similar analysis has led an increasing number of news organizations to shut down this channel of audience interaction entirely.<\/p>\n

However, as a public media organization, value to NCPR is only part of the proposition. So I invite you to tell us (in a comment below, appropriately enough) what the value is to you<\/em> in having listener comments available on all the stories and blog posts within the NCPR site.<\/p>\n

We don’t think it is appropriate for NCPR to cut off this interaction entirely, as some of our peers have done, but we do need to manage it differently. So these three things inform our proposed change in comment policy: 1) the majority of stories we publish get zero comment; 2) our current comment policy evolved before the rise of social media as a more powerful tool to support this kind of engagement; and 3) each story attracting comments has an author, who should be empowered to engage with the audience around her work, or not.<\/p>\n

So we propose to change the default setting permitting comments on a story or post to “off” and to let individual authors hold the key to engagement with their work. Almost all stories that people do want to comment about also appear in our Facebook feed, and we encourage people to engage there, if they can’t comment on the story within the website. Facebook engagement is, as a rule, much more civil because people have to use their own names there and this has a moderating effect on their behavior. And we propose to direct comment traffic for stories we carry from other outlets such as NPR and other public media back to the version of the story at those sources, which have their own moderation policies and staff.<\/p>\n

We aim to retain the value of conversation around the news and features of the day, but we also aim to not be so busy reading that we have no time to reply or to do our work or to eat and sleep. How does that sound to you? Let us know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few weeks the NCPR three-person digital team has been doing a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16918,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16916\/revisions\/16918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}