blogging

Someone needs to open the windows at the Chicago Tribune and let some air in. Perhaps from the perspective of an editorial writer, the blogosphere is all about uninformed opinion. Note that the editorial repeats the oft-told right-wing lie about Al Gore as well.

Was it just my imagination, or did I see a round of "they just don't get it" hooting aimed at the Houston Chronicle when Dwight Silverman asked members of the public to become Chronicle "passion" bloggers?

Well, Jeff Jarvis points out that they're up and running now, and the topics are an interesting collection: Cooking. Motherhood. Scrapbooking. Pets. Guns, poker, cars and tech toys.

Some of those topics are chronically (no pun intended) underreported by newspapers. For that matter, they're not the kind of thing that most A-list bloggers think important, either. But they are the kind of thing that real people care about.

Now comes the test: Will the community step up and engage? Or does the newspaper's "we write, you read" brand stifle the interaction before it gets started?

Personally, I favor a more open table and a more conversational, less structured approach than these official, yet unofficial bloggers, but this one small step is an important move toward closing the gap between the lives real people live and the journalism we practice.

There's an ongoing conversation in online news circles about identity and community. Vin Crosbie's distinction between anonymity and pseudonymity is a good one. I think there actually are five identity models that I've experienced:

1. Real, verified, published names. I first encountered this when working with Ziff-Davis Interchange. Under the Interchange model, publishers (such as Star Tribune Online and the Washington Post Digital Ink) operated their own paid-access services charged on credit cards, so the names were genuine. The discussion quality was first-class and behavior was sterling.
2. Real names required but not verified. When we moved the Star Tribune's online operation to the Web, we transported the existing discussion culture and rules -- but we had no method for enforcing the real-name rule. Periodically we'd have incidents, but overall the conversational quality level was maintained. (The biggest incident came when Salon booted a long list of troublemakers, who discovered the Star Tribune was running similar software. It was like an plague of locusts, but the local culture eventually prevailed.)
3. Pseudonyms allowed, tied to unpublished real names. This is the model we selected for BlufftonToday.com, and I think it's an excellent compromise. Our goal was to get broad participation, and this model helps protect participants from offline harassment and stalkers. The site has been extraordinarily successful with women in that hard-to-reach 24-40 segment. Most participants use pseudonyms (some even blog using the identity of their pets), but some prefer to display their real names. Staffers use real names.
4. Pseudonyms allowed with complete anonymity. This is the model that was in place at most Morris newspapers when I arrived, and the model that existed at Cox when I was there. There is some "reputation management" effect even with pseudonyms, but overall those systems tend to be dominated by a small number of users, generally men, who often are aggressive and occasionally abusive in their behavior.
5. Completely open systems -- post under any name you want (or in Slashdot's case as "Anonymous Coward"). In my experience this almost always leads to rampant abuse. There are ways of applying community moderation (Slashdot's system is an example) that pushes morons and trolls into the background, but I generally wouldn't recommend this model to anyone seeking to build local community. In addition to the interpersonal abuse problem, open systems recently have been overrun by spam.

I think identity has a powerful affect on the quality of conversation, but it is not by any means the only powerful factor. Clear goals, clear rules, visible staff participation and leadership, and consistent oversight/management are equally important factors that have nothing to do with technology and are all too frequently overlooked. I have seen many well-led anonymous systems with both high participation and good behavior.

There is one other model that I occasionally encounter: enforced pre-publication review. I don't know of a single site that has been able to build a positive interactive environment while requiring contributors to submit their postings for editorial review before they are published. The model simply doesn't work. I still occasionally encounter a dinosaur editor who thinks it's a good idea. I usually manage to bring him around with some legal liability arguments. What really bothers me about the whole idea is the disrespect and distrust of the community that it reveals.

There's a temptation to look at the Washington Post blog blowup and perform a cost-benefit analysis on interactivity. Clearly you can't just toss interactivity technology -- comment systems, forums, chat rooms, whatever -- onto a website and get nothing but happy flowers and joy blossoms. User comments alone aren't interaction. Staff needs to be involved -- responding, leading, and occasionally mopping up spills. Human resources aren't free.

But interaction isn't optional. Maybe it never was -- an institution that behaves arrogantly eventually reaps the whirlwind. A lot of the anger directed against "mainstream media" comes from people who resent the historic imbalance of power between media and so-called consumers. At any rate, the individual empowerment made possible by the Internet has rendered the notion of a one-way media lecture obsolete. We have to deal with it.

Jeff Jarvis has some thoughts today about being interactive:

"First, too many people judge interactivity by the worst of it, which is rather like refusing to visit New York because you hear there are a few assholes there. This, I think, comes mostly from people who wish they could dismiss interactivity, and the internet and blogs with it. Sorry, but interactivity — and New York — are here to stay.

"The second mistake some people make is assuming that the rest of us can’t figure out who the assholes are. With that comes the presumption that we need to be protected from the bozos, that that is media’s (and, in other contexts, government’s) job. People sometimes ask me why I don’t kill stupid comments from various bozos. I reply that I figure most people know they’re bozos and judge them accordingly."

Hear hear from here.

But I think it would be a mistake to dwell on the occasionally ugly side and miss the benefits.

Our newsrooms have, at best, a tenuous connection with reality. I don't mean that as an insult; I mean it because it's true of all of us, regardless of whether we have press cards. What we see and hear is just a scratch on the surface of a very large planet. The intensely difficult job of a professional journalist is to reach out beyond that scratch, using every tool available, to discover and then present a larger picture to help others expand their worldviews.

Participating in a community conversation is one powerful tool for doing that. It isn't cheap, it isn't easy, and on occasion it isn't very pleasant. But it's what we signed up for, whether we knew it or not.