Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Amy Gahran Bob Stains of the Public Conversations Project (left) talks with Poynter's Bob Steele and Kelly McBride. Maidstone Mulenga of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle works in the background.

Today I'm attending Poynter's seminar on "Dialog and Diatribe." Mainly, it's about how and why news organizations might expand further into conversational media. Mostly we've been discussing blog comments and discussion forums. While these are popular tools that may seem newfangled to many media pros, they only scratch the surface in terms of how people conduct public conversations today, especially online.

It seems to me the demographics of this seminar group may circumscribe our discussions. We're almost exclusively baby boomers and GenXers in this room. Plus, we're almost all media professionals. (Three local non-journalists were invited, but only one remains today.) I only met one recent college grad in the session, and there are certainly no teens present.

Amy Gahran Conversations, conversations.... John Jackson of Roanoke.com (left) and Poynter's director of interactive learning Howard Finberg.

Most participants seem to share many assumptions, preferences, and experiences of online media. It seems to me we could, and should, expand our discussion beyond those boundaries. Personally, I think some approaches to online media which may not be especially popular with this crowd offer significant opportunities to broaden our options in practical, immediate ways.

Here are a few tools and strategies to consider about conversational, social, and online media:

1. Highlight key contributions prominently. Almost all news organizations which allow comments or host online discussion relegate those conversations to a sideshow role -- definitely secondary to the editorial content, with little if any indication of how the conversation influences the newsroom. This approach offers scant motivation for folks to offer thoughtful contributions.
   

   I like what Slate.com does: They highlight the best recent forum posts. Check out the main page of Slate's discussion forum The Fray. Consider how this approach could enhance the quality of your public conversation, as well as provide timely, engaging fodder for online, print, and broadcast news.
   

2. Roll your own Digg. Social news sites like Digg allow people to share and rank news stories, blog posts, podcasts, and other types of content are extremely popular. This approach can offer even more value when focused on specific topics or communities. For instance, the popular environmental news and community site Treehugger created Hugg, which is like Digg for the environment. The free tool Pligg helps power such community news sites. Also, you can filter and integrate Digg content through Digg's API.

   What if you created one for your community, or around key local topics or demographics? What do local teens, seniors, or other groups think is worth covering? Letting them set their own news agendas might tell you a lot about what matters most to them.

3. Distribute conversations, not just stories. Many (perhaps most) news organizations now offer RSS feeds of their headlines, blogs, or news stories -- but not for comments or forums. However, providing comment and forum feeds and submitting them to the major feed aggregators (like Technorati and Google Blog Search) broaden your audience by by making all of your content and conversation easier to find through popular search engines. This can not only increase traffic but attract new people to your online community.

   If you do this, however, it helps to moderate comments or at least syndicate them on a delay, so you have a chance to pull obscene posts, unsubstantiated allegations, spam, libel, or hate speech before it hits the feed. Once it's out there, it's out there -- so removing a comment or forum post doesn't really make it gone.

4. Microblogging. Tools like Twitter (which Poynter's Mallary JeanTenore, who is definitely not a Baby Boomer, covered here and here), Jaiku, Pownce, and Tumblr are great for quickly publishing very short posts or updates, especially from mobile devices. Why not microblog intriguing or important community discussions, as well as more traditional coverage? If you do this, make sure your conversation venues (blog or news comments, or forums) have mobile interfaces so mobile phone and "crackberry" users can easily chime in.
   
   
5. Wikis. The really cool thing about these collaboratively authored documents is that they work best in discussions where consensus is the goal. For instance, building a community resource (such as a survey of the local watershed), or brainstorming solutions to local problems (such as education funding). Differing perspectives get their own pages to allow full exploration, and the consensus comes through links and discussion pages. Registration and history pages provides accountability, and (depending on the wiki tool or service) you may be able to offer various gradations of editing permissions.
   
6. Audio commenting. Not everyone is a writer. Some community members are more inclined to participate in conversations by voice. Services like K7.net turn voice mail messages into MP3 audio that can easily be integrated into a podcast, or dowloaded/streamed from your site. Depending on your community's needs and preferences, the human voice can enhance or hinder conversation.

...Each of these options has pros and cons. They involve initial setup, some direct or indirect costs, some maintenance, and ongoing attention. However they might also further a news organization's goals by strengthening community ties and awareness. But the cool part is that it's easy to conduct small, inexpensive experiments with any of these options.

So if you're unsure or skeptical, just experiment with something small. Remember that, from your community's perspective, your site probably isn't the point -- so adapt your business model accordingly. See how conversational media works, especially its distributed nature. Most importantly, talk about it -- not just in your newsroom, but in your community. In public.

(Here's my other post for this seminar, on conversational journalism. Don't miss the comments.)

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