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Creating a Space for Community Conversation
Or, How to Have User-Generated Content on Your Site that Facilitates Conversation and Won’t Get You Fired
It’s a question that lots of papers are struggling with – “I want to include comments and other user-generated content on my site, but I don’t want a bunch of trolls arguing, and I don’t want to get sued.”
Super Quick Non-binding Legal Overview
Your organization is considered the publisher of any *content* that is published on your site as an article – whether written by your staff or the public – and you are liable for its content, just as if you had printed it in the paper.
Generally, you are not liable for *comments* left on your site. However, if a staffer leaves a comment, and doing so can reasonably be construed as a part of their job duties, you *might* be liable. If you *edit* a comment in any way, you are responsible for the remainder of the comment’s content. And, if your organization has a specific comments policy (i.e. “No racism allowed!”) and it fails to remove a comment that violates this policy in a reasonable timeframe, you might be liable for this failure to act.
Whew.
So … legal mojo aside, how do you create a space for conversations?
Step 1: Four Cs of Creating Community Conversation
Take out a piece of paper and jot down your answers to these questions.
Community
Who are the community members you expect to contribute content? Think about your web product – is it your entire site, or a stand-alone venture like a blog? Does your entire town have something to say, or just the music fans? And who are the listeners – the ‘lurkers’ who might never contribute, but might be faithful readers?
Conflict
What kind of conflict can you imagine this audience having? How will the content on your site contribute to conflict? For example, a forum about welfare reform will attract a different type of conversation than one about the best spot in town to get sushi.
Constructive Corraling
How can you steer your community away from conflict and towards conversation? Will your community behave itself if they are all identified by their real names? Is comment moderation the answer (not publishing comments until they have been approved by a human editor)? Or will a free-wheeling “we’ll take it down if it gets really bad” approach work for your community?
Calculate Risks and Benefits
Your ‘constructive corraling’ solution will have pros and cons. Weigh them in context of your staffing realities.
- If you require folks to use their real names as a moderation device, will that prevent them from trash talking? How can you verify this?
- If you decide to moderate comments, do you have the staffing ability to review comments in real time? (A comment moderated a week later does not facilitate conversation).
- If you decide to just let the content fly, what are you risking?
Step 2: Experiment
We’re putting together a community blog for the upcoming 2007 AAN Convention at Portland2007.AAN.org. Inspired by the community blog for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, this blog will allow any conference attendee to post an ‘article’ – which AAN will be legally liable for. Here’s how I handled the content challenge.
Example: Community Blog at Portland2007.AAN.org
Community: My community consists of employees of AAN papers, associate members like cartoonists and software vendors, and folks who are interested in alternative media. My listeners consist of, well, everyone – but especially folks with a beef against specific papers or individuals.
Conflict: An industry characterized by mergers, buyouts and staffing changes is full of potential sources of conflict.
Constructive Corraling: Folks might be willing to say nasty stuff anonymously, but I am making the assumption that if they are only allowed to publish using their real names, that will curtail much of the trash talking. (Hopefully?) My constructive corraling mechanism was to moderate identity creation – that is, I am only allowing folks with verifiable identities to post on the blog. To create a user account, a potential author must submit a valid, verifiable email address – no ihatemyoldboss@gmail.com.
Calculate Risks and Benefits: Of course, verifying an email address requires a human editor – and even the fastest editor isn’t as fast as the instant gratification of a computer. I balanced the annoying wait time against the possible trouble I would get into if folks were allowed to post willy-nilly on the site, and decided it was worth it.
So, my experimental solution to creating a space for community conversation is to require folks to use their real identities – hoping that’ll force ‘em to play nice.
Step 3: Listen and Adjust
No matter how well thought out your solution is, it’s important to realize that you are herding cats. Listen to your users – what they think about your technical setup, what they think about the conversations that happen on the site, and more importantly, to the conversations themselves.
In that spirt, what do you think of my technical solution? Have I played the 4 Cs of Creating Community Conversation correctly? What tactics have you tried?
The Golden Rule of Commenting for Newspaper Employees
May 16, 2007 at 9:47 am · Filed under Content, comments, community, conversation, legal
Treat your audience the way you’d like to be treated: identify yourself and your biases clearly.
The comments in the post Creating A Space for Community Conversation sparked this post.
One of the many great questions in the comments was:
Yes – all staffers should be required to use their real names.
A modified version of the Golden Rule is a simple ethical guideline: Treat your audience as you would like to be treated.
For the most part, we’d like to discourage our users from coming on our site, assuming fake names, and posting comments they don’t necessarily believe in, just to start controversy. Those people are called trolls, and they are disliked because they make it harder for people to have conversations.
It goes without saying that reporters are required to use their real names when commenting on a story; the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal fired a reporter in 2006 for commenting anonymously on his own work to ’set the record straight,’ and the L.A. Times reassigned Michael Hiltzik for posting anonymous comments on a District Attorney’s blog. Hiltzik was reprimanded for violating the Times‘ ethics guidelines, which state: “Staff members must not misrepresent themselves and must not conceal their affiliation with The Times.”
But what about other employees of the paper? What rules apply to them? And what of the question posed by Matt Writt in the comments of Creating A Space for Community Conversation?
Matt brings up an complicated point – let’s take it back to the Golden Rule. Would we want our audience to come onto our site and comment on a story without revealing that their brother is featured in it? Or that their PR office represents the restaurant that they are praising lavishly?
We certainly can’t stop a commenter from hiding their affiliations, but we can encourage transparency by practicing it ourselves. Creating a community where folks feel comfortable acknowledging their differences and discussing them in a constructive fashion is hard work – and leading by example is an easy way to set the community standard for behavior.
Matt works for the paper; an obvious bias. Given the small staff of alt-papers, it’s likely that he might be friendly with the reporter whose work he is commenting on – friendly with the section editor, copy editor, editorial designer. He might even know the subjects of the article, or patronize some businesses mentioned. These biases are transparent only when he identifies himself as an employee of the paper.
And on a legal note: Matt may not be bound by the ethical responsibilities of a journalist, but as an employee of the paper, the comments he leaves on the site could be legally construed as part of his job duties, which would leave the paper liable for anything he says on the site – whether he uses his own name or not.
[A note on personal transparency: I identify myself as LauraFries.com on this blog, which is the name I use whenever writing on the Internet. The blurb about me on the 'About the Author' page on this blog (accessible via the 'About' page or the footer navigation) links to my personal blog, with more than ample documentation of my own biases. I adhere to our Editorial Policy stringently.]
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