Making readers' opinions work

Readers and commenters at the McClatchy Next wiki are abuzz about anonymous comments at newspaper web sites and blogs.
Don't click away -- I know this subject has been done to death. I promise a different approach.
Many of the comments have been fueled by the vitriolic name-calling recently in comments at Etaoin Shrdlu, the blog of McClatchy's vice president for news, Howard Weaver.

Let's face it: Weaver's public blog and position make him an easy target these days, much like Tony and Peter and Par were in previous days. I'm sure he doesn't feel quite as rich, but I'm sure he feels just as targeted with anger.

So let's take a different path, as job cuts hit editorial departments and as McClatchy sites look at new technical toys for enabling and highlighting comments.

Let's take a look at what works: The Observer's letters to the editor, and a couple of Observer blogs. I'm sure there are other examples of print features and sites that work, but I offer these up as ones I know best. I'd love to hear about others.

One of the major reasons I was attracted to The Charlotte Observer 20-some odd years ago was the vibrancy of the editorial pages. Much of that vibrancy came from the letters to the editor.
These days, Lew Powell is still editing those letters (as far as I know. I've been away from work email for a few days), and The Observer still kicks butt with the feature.

I'll be more specific: The Charlotte Observer still kicks The News and Observer's butt and many other papers with its letters to the editor. The Observer's printed letters cover a wide variety of subjects, are concise, quick and to-the-point. The News and Observer has plenty of letters online, but they're less concise. A recent printed News and Observer also had fewer, longer letters than The Charlotte Observer's daily printed product.

In addition, some Charlotte Observer blogs have fostered vibrant, often thoughtful commenting communities, with questions and thoughts that resemble the salons, not saloons, of days of yore.

So let's find out why, while we still have Lew Powell with us and while those bloggers still have time to engage those communities.

Then, perhaps, we can figure out how to make money from those communities without destroying them, or share their content on a wider basis, or emulate their success to give other readers a place for thoughtful comments that they seem to crave.

Here's the letters policy, in part:
"Please sign and include your address and daytime telephone number. We edit for brevity, grammar, clarity and accuracy, and we reject letters published elsewhere. Letters typically address a single idea and do not exceed 150 words."

Yes, 150 words.

That policy is backed up by Lew, (and others on the editorial board. Added 7/30). Here's what was published for the Sunday, July 27, edition:
12 letters
11 subjects
At least 7 with reference to specific previous stories, editorials or letters.
8 from male writers
4 from female writers
1 from a writer under age 13.
The longest letter included 147 words: the letter from the young person.
3 letters included less than 50 words.
All letters are signed with a name and home town. Phone numbers and addresses are not published.
(This example actually was produced by esteemed Editorial Page Editor Ed Williams, who retires this year. Lew was on vacation. But they back up each other's standards, and Lew says he won't let Ed get letters published more than once a month after his retirement. Added 7/30.)

Stuff I don't know:
How many letters are received each week? How many are rejected? How many have to be edited to that 150 word limit or shortened further? How many are from repeat writers? How could new tech tools ease the workload, integrate the letters more with online comments, or enrich information, links and visuals to the letter writers, so readers can know more about specific letter writers while protecting privacy for those writers who want it? Is it worth the time it would take? Does Lew call every letter writer each time they write?

Compared to comments on blogs, Lew's published version of the letters gives me a chance to hear what people are thinking on a wide variety of topics, quickly and concisely. It's what's left out that's important here.

No wasted words.

Blogs, on the other hand, give commenters unlimited space and quicker interactivity with other posters as well as the original blogger. I can't afford the time to visit them frequently, but here are some details about two of my favorites.

The Naked City, from Mary Newsom: The latest post, "Any hope for '60s suburbia?" poses a detailed question in 121 words and asks for comments. It was posted Thursday, July 24. As of Sunday, July 27, at noonish, it had 31 comments. 10 comments used pseudonyms or names. 20 used anonymous. One was pure spam, but the others were generally thoughtful and positive.
32 visitors came to the blog as of about 1 p.m. Sunday, July 27 (the slowest day of the week). 1,146 came on Thursday, the day of the last posting. 1,746 hits came on Tuesday, with a posting done at 6:05 p.m. The timing of comments and hits appears to indicate that many readers are using RSS feeds to watch for new postings. (Hit stats are from a Sitemeter bug at the blog. I wonder whether that immediate feedback tool will disappear with our site redesign. Will be a shame if that happens).

And another:
Sacred Space, from Jane Pope: The latest post, "Are we born cruel or kind?" poses a detailed question in 126 words and asks for comments. It was posted Friday, July 25. As of Sunday, July 27, at noonish, it had 42 comments, one of which had been removed by the author. Comments frequently referred to specific other commenters by their pseudonyms or names. Only two people posted completely as anonymous.
Gamecock made 15 comments.
Iztok made 8 comments.
Pete made 7 comments.
Others made one or two comments.

Things I don't know about Sacred Space: Hit counts. But I'd suggest that Gamecock and Iztok get a little credit for those hits -- not from just themselves, but from all the other readers coming back to watch their dialog.

Something else I don't know: How much total time these bloggers estimate they spend on writing and moderating comments, and how they are moderating comments. Are they autopublishing any comment, and then catching up later to edit? Or are they approving each comment separately? (Surely not).

I do know both Mary and Jane have had to remind -- and perhaps scold -- commenters to remain civil. Mary has had to delete the worst of the inflammatory, nasty comments. I assume Jane has had to do so as well. If one wants a well-kept saloon, or salon, setting some standards is necessary. Real people seem to work better than automated technology, in this case.

So what's next?
It's clear that creating online (or print) communities with a high level of discourse and value requires some human intervention. It's clear that creating enclaves of reasoned thought is possible even in a broader online (or print) free-for-all of anonymous comments.

Not so clear, and worth discussion:
Could some advertisers aiming at specific audiences be missing out by not advertising on some of our blogs? Will our online redesign give an opportunity for such ads in a not-in-your-face way? Is there a sales rep. in the house who can gather some more numbers and target tasteful advertisers who aren't already spending money with us? How will we preserve the time for folks like Lew, Jane and Mary to moderate, edit and encourage those communities? How much time are those communities worth? How can we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater as we streamline our staffing? And how can we connect some of these subject-specific communities for cross-pollination? (Some of the most frequent commenters do jump around or migrate from blog to blog already.) How can we reward the most thoughtful commenters? How can print benefit from the online comments?

Interesting questions, as we go forward.

Let's hope we make the right decisions.

Grumpy truth-seeking about preps and video

More than a week after the end of Independence High's historic winning football streak, I sought video to embed here or share on Facebook.

Apparently, WBTV has a channel on Youtube. People can subscribe. They can leave comments and even get real live answers to their comments from real live people. OMG.

They didn't use audio and video of the actual game, so emotion and excitement are a bit lacking. With this report, they missed what former Observer Sports Editor Gary Schwab calls "The Moment."

So did we. We're moving ahead with talking heads video on preps, but without the visual and audio to capture the moment, how many hits are we actually drawing? And then getting to return?

Amateurs for the opposing team captured the audio and video, and displayed it on Youtube below. Warning: it's one minute and 15 seconds of jubilant fans shouting. Certainly captures emotion, though I get a glitch with 14 seconds remaining to play in the video.



Note: I can't embed video from our new video setup at charlotte.com, but I can email or Digg a video. Allentown (a Tribune site) has the email capability as well, but no embedding. Were we hoping for embedding capability with new video software? Should we just spend time and (very little) money on setting up our own Youtube channel and linking back to ourselves like WBTV?

Adding to grumpiness: In looking around, I see video ads in Charlotte for Lending Tree and Bojangles. Comparing Kansas City: They have intrusive, tacky, looping ads for car dealers, including KCcars.com ... they in no way compare to the elegance of the online French Peugeot ad I saw recently. And I sure hope those companies are paying, and not just giving us "reader contributed" videos to see what they can get for free.
Who is this "channel" and technology for?

Adding to grumpiness II: In looking around in Charlotte, I cannot find a trace of our good videos and stuff related to the history of school integration, even though we had an update Sunday. Only way to find it is to search for the writer, Tommy Tomlinson, and get a link off his stories. You have to know it's there, and who wrote the story, to be able to find it.

Harry Potter and the Driver of Traffic

So "The Naked City's" transformation into the Potterblog has been highly successful, and I'm loving the content.
Reminds me of one cynical definition of a leader: Find out where the crowd is going, get in front of it, and say, "Follow me!"
In this case, I love where the crowd is going.
But as we focus on driving traffic, the old journalism ethics still apply: Just getting out in front of the crowd and giving them what they want can skew our coverage. One comment at the potterblog reflects this, but with bitterness.
"Congrats, Mary. You've gone from an active blog with 90+ posts discussing important issues that affect those who live and love Charlotte to one of hundreds of blogs that blather on about a book.
Why?
Is this part of the 'dumbing down' that the Observer (and most of McClatchy media) is doing? You know, more articles on paris Hilton and big pictures of kids and puppies that readers send in rather than good reporting on stories that affect people?
The results on your blog speak volumes for McClatchy/Observer's approach. You used to get 50+ posts and now you get 10...maybe."

Group psychology: It's intriguing that the potterblog draws more traffic, fewer comments. Some of the posters who regularly argued back and forth at the blog are upset that the conversation has gone elsewhere, but indications in the past were that many lurkers at the blog declined to enter the posting fray. What are the group dynamics of this? Is it a male/female thing sometimes? An age thing? How does a blogger engage the quiet readers and get them to post? Should a blogger even worry about that, as long as the traffic is coming?

Do in-paper refers drive traffic?

Not for a blog about Harry Potter, at least not by 9:40 a.m. on a summer morning, even though a front-page story had a refer to this blog.
(Re-editing this post as new numbers come in. Certainty fades to uncertainty, the more facts you have).
By noon or 1 p.m., traffic had rebounded some, possibly because a link to the blog was posted at the very top of our website in a Harry Potter visual package.
Eventually, the day's numbers surpassed the 818 visitors that came on Saturday, just after the first Harry Potter post went up. Eventual number was 838.
In this case, it looks like many blog readers are using RSS or some other blog-watching software. The blog writer, Mary Newsom, believes the in-paper refer from her Saturday column was a major force in driving the Saturday morning traffic. The post was posted Friday night at 11:35 p.m., and the flood of hits came about 8 am. to 10 a.m. the next morning. I suspect it was a combination of RSS readers and the in-paper refer placed with her op-ed column.

To quote the Dayton managing editor awhile back: "Google is now the front page of the newspaper."

I think it's gone beyond that, to software that monitors particular sites and updates readers with headlines pointing to new content (often called RSS, but not all the software is "real" RSS, and not all of it is complicated).
But that software isn't perfect: The latest posting to Mary's blog was up about noontime. My Google Reader did not update with the new posting until 3:30 p.m. That lag might not mean much for overnight postings aimed at readers' morning reading habits, but for real news monitoring, it's unforgivable. There might be settings at Blogger or elsewhere that can speed this up.
Update: I created a Facebook group, Potterblog Fan Club, to push the blog, as an exercise in driving traffic. It brought a couple of hits, one at 10:40 p.m. Monday night. The timing seems obvious, for anyone who knows teenagers. I have a hunch that traditional newspaper readers are the ones logging in and reading in the morning, and the non-traditional younger readers are primarily the ones visiting later at night. Generally.
The Facebook group is up to five members as of 10 a.m. Tuesday -- obviously, the key is connecting with those viral folks who have lots of friends, not Facebook newbies like me.

Flickr

Not only are we not getting that nasty warning when we go to Flickr from inside the newsroom, but folks on the Charlotte Flickr group are posting links to our news website from their pictures. Somebody did this for the business story about South 21 at this Flickr space.

Now we can do that too and drive traffic from Flickr to charlotte.com, even at work.

Better navigation, fewer page views?

Some folks are wondering why traffic as measured in page views has dropped off at USA.com.
Could be the companies doing the counting, or it could be the way page views are counted, or it could be faster, easier navigation, suggest a couple of new comments at Howard Owens' blog.
Analogy: planned obsolescence? If we let traffic metrics drive our decisions too much, we'll make our pages more complicated to drive up page views. (We'll make cars that don't last so customers will buy more replacement cars.)
Honda and Toyota didn't go there.
I wish there was a way to measure quality time and satisfaction of visitors as well: did they spend lots of time reading and viewing, or did they spend lots of time trying to find what they needed? Sounds like a graduate degree research project, or Eyetrack study.
Can we quantify satisfaction? I.E., does a 1-minute visit mean a visitor was dissatisfied, while a 3-minute visit mean they found what they needed?

Five questions for online projects

Staffers from ajc.com spoke at an SND conference last weekend in Atlanta.
They highlighted five questions to ask before starting an online project:

• Does it have an audience? Who?


• Will it generate traffic?


• Does it provide a service to the reader?


• Will it have a long shelf life?


• Do you have the resources to pull it off?

More at Charles Apple's blog.

Naked melee development zoning (your neighborhood name here)

Those words drive traffic, based on the hit reports Dave has been sharing from our company website lately.
And it's also based on the hit reports I see on my neighborhood's blog. People buying real estate or planning to move first surf.
If we had naked melee zoning and newcomer stories, we'd get lots of hits.

What drives traffic? Reader comments

Tuesday, June 19: Our lead editorial on Nifong and the Duke case rises to No. 6 on charlotte.com's What's Hot list. Editorials generally don't make this list.
It's just three notches below "Doctors find six sewing needles in baby," wryly noted Lew Powell.
Obviously, the case has long been an Internet hot button. Still, I suspect enabling reader comments on this one helped lots too. By 2 p.m., 30 people had commented online, and I bet each one of those commentators hits the site again after they make their comment to see how people respond. At least once.

Who needs a full time web developer?

Hire a company to do it for you.

I had an interview today with Jean Dubail, the AME/Online at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They've been working with a California-based company called Caspio. Basic idea is that you get them your data through a wizard on their servers. They will then generate html code that you import onto your pagees. Readers can then search the database from your site, pulling information from their servers. Cleveland.com has used this a great deal for campaign finance information, crime, etc. Seems like a great way to get the developer in your hands when you need them most.

Couple examples built with the help of this Caspio technology:
Guitarmania http://www.cleveland.com/guitarmania/
A United Way fundraiser - like the cows or the rocking chairs Charlotte had a while back. Start from this database, pick the guitar you want to look at and it pulls the vitals from the database and then maps the location for you.

The King James Statistical Bible http://www.cleveland.com/sports/lebron_stats/
One of Dubail's favorites, this one lets you take a look at Lebron's stats in any number of ways.

Earthquake report http://www.cleveland.com/weather/earthquake_report/
A minor earthquake a couple months ago. The website asked readers to add their information to the database. It's then mapped on a Google map.

Cleveland.com's top hits are routinely sports - with the Cavs in the NBA Finals that's off the charts right now. Browns fans can't get enough. Dubail gave me today's stats: the top 5 stories were all sports. About half of Monday's unique visitors went to sports pages and accounted for about 45% of the page views.
They're developing a database of all things Browns that will encompass the 60-some year history of the team. It's taking a lot of manpower, but they're aiming to have it running in time for preseason. The hope is this database will let you search game by game for stats AND for stories from the PD. There's also one in the works for a huge high school sports database of schedules, records, results and the like.
For a town where sports traffic means big business, these two seem like fabulous ideas.

The idea of traffic

If you're ready for some heavy-duty reading about traffic and the structure of websites, see Buzz Machine from May 29.
If you'd rather have some edgy eye candy, try We Are Sharks and We Never Stop Swimming..
One of those pages links to a multimedia presentation on the effects of Chernobyl. Go there if you have a home high-speed connection and audio turned on.
Chernobyl photo essay.

Who's reading?

If blogging has its narcissistic elements, why not add voyeuristic as well?
The Naked City has added a little Sitemeter bug at the bottom of the blog, and now Mary Newsom can see where her readers are, when they're visiting and where they're coming from.
Other visitors can click on the bug as well.
Actually, there is business value here: We always say it's important to know who your readers are. And this feature allows bloggers to measure their traffic, to answer Cheryl's question, "What Drives Traffic?"
Perhaps an added bonus: Will such a little bug deter nasty posters?
Bonus No. 2: Don't go to the other Naked City blog by mistake. Unless you're about to spend an academic year in Boston.

Driving traffic in Des Moines

Randy Brubaker, the ME at The Des Moines Register, told me in April about some of the big draws on their Web site DesMoinesRegister.com. They're doing a lot of innovative things there in a newsroom basically comparable to ours. (They've got about 200; the paper has changed some jobs, reassigned and not filled some positions in order to create new online jobs.) I'd especially recommend Juice, their site for 25- to 34-year-olds.

• The data page draws a lot of visitors, especially the state salary database. But Brubaker expects the vital stats database will overtake it in the next year.
• Photo galleries drive big traffic, as long as they're linked from the home page.
• Reader-submitted photos, submitted using TextAmerica, are starting to generate some steady interest, as are the community (hyperlocal) pages.
• The site offers a lot of "interactivity," including quizzes, giveaways and games. The spelling quiz and age game at the top right on this page are examples of the interactive graphics produced by the graphics staff.
• Their fueling Iowa's future page features interactive content such as Google maps to locate biodiesel centers. Obviously, this is a major issue for them, and I think this page shows the value of grouping and archiving related content. Check out all the videos and graphics.
• Finally, on the heels of IndyMoms.com, Des Moines has launched a moms special-interest site. This is a good example of the kind of online community the paper and its site can help create. Once this takes off, Brubaker expects the paper will use some of this new functionality in sports and elsewhere on the site.