Since January, readers of The Wisconsin State Journal have had a voice in the daily page one meeting via an online poll. When the other WSJ debuted the “Reader’s Choice” poll, newsrooms across the country took notice. For two or three weeks, the Journal was a hot topic. The Associated Press, National Public Radio and dozens of other news outlets wrote about the practice. I know this because I took many phone calls and I professed then that I believed this to be a good thing, because it provided an opportunity for the newsroom to hear from a wider audience.
The hand-wringing died down quickly and the Journal returned to a mostly Wisconsin audience.
But this is the Internet, where nothing is ever really dies down. Madison resident and blogger Mike Basford decided the (other) WSJ was getting a little too big for its britches. So he logged onto the Daily Kos and stirred things up a bit, encouraging readers from anywhere and everywhere to weigh in on one of the five choices. His campaign had a significant impact. You can read his blow-by-blow here.
Kristian Knutsen of Madison’s alternative paper, The Isthmus, dismisses the poll as a gimmick and offers his analysis of the pros and cons of the Journal’s new experiment and the obvious flaws inherent to all online surveys.
Journal Managing Editor Tim Kelley says the idea is not to create a scientific representation of reader wishes, but to get more people to read the news.
No poll is immune to being punkd, but because it leads to increased Web traffic and potential interest in the State Journal, this really doesn’t bother us too much. If groups want to organize to see if they can put a certain story on Page 1 by getting a whole bunch of people to vote for it through our Reader’s Choice feature, that just helps bring more eyes to the Web site and, hopefully, generates more interest in the next day’s paper, too.
In a recent e-mail exchange with me, he said he did make some changes after Basford punkd him.
This type of manipulation has led us to narrow the poll choices. For example, we now steer away from putting political stories up for a vote because we know they will attract partisan punking. We definitely don’t want the poll to become a tool for partisans to get bigger play for stories unflattering to political opponents, especially during a big local and state election year in Wisconsin. Both times we have uncovered meddling with the poll, the stories targeted were unflattering to a Wisconsin elected official (Democrat in one case, Republican in the other). On the upside, this forces us to get more creative with the choices we offer voters.
In addition to that, Kelley said his webmasters monitor the voting closely and subtract duplicate votes coming from the same user.
Web polls are just one of the many areas where we are adjusting our standards and definitions as we expand from traditional mediums to online. It’s a genuine journalistic value to do all that one can to engage the public in serious dialogue. While no one is suggesting there are no standards online, the Reader’s Choice poll in Madison suggests we will do things online that we would never do in our more traditional platform, not just because we can, but because we have to in order to connect. I still believe the Madison experiment is a good use of a new tool, when it is kept in check. And Kelley and crew seem capable of keeping the poll in proper perspective.
Still, imagine what mischief-makers might do if they could write in their own choice for a front page story as opposed to just picking one selected by the paper. How about dueling mischief-makers? It would get more traffic to your site.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect spelling and identification for Kristian Knutsen.
