Newspapers need to take responsibility for the quality of conversations

Posted on July 28, 2008 by pat

“I’m convinced that newspapers need to rise up and take responsibility not just for the quality of the news, but for the quality of the conversation,” – Monia Guzman.

Instead of complaining that comments sections on newspaper Web sites are worthless, newspapers need to start actively cultivating conversations. The Web is about community, and communities are about conversations. Are newspapers in or out?

Head over to BeatBlogging.Org to read and listen to my full interview with Guzman, the first online reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Part of her job is to cultivate and analyze conversations on the PI’s Web site. Shouldn’t ever newspaper have at least one journalist who does this?

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  • http://powazek.com Derek Powazek

    Exactly! You said, much more succinctly, what I was getting at in my post on the same subject, 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments: http://powazek.com/posts/1063

  • http://onlinecommunitystrategist.wordpress.com Angela Connor

    This is pretty much what I’ve been saying in the comments section of several blogs for several months, as well as in my own. I’m passionate about user comments. Managing them is not an insurmountable task, by any means. You can find my two cents on comments here:
    http://tinyurl.com/6jwo2n

  • http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/12/02/broken-windows-and-a-call-for-help/ Broken windows and a call for help — mathewingram.com/work

    [...] to fix the windows, in other words (in addition to removing flagged comments quickly), and of taking responsibility for the conversation. That’s part of what I tried to do with a recent post, in which I read [...]

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