The other hot zone: Community. Friday's talk at OJR 2006

Update: Erica Ogg live-blogged the session here on the Online Journalism Review.

Tomorrow, the day after Yahoo has announced its decision not to go into the TV business and instead focus on user-created content (hat-tip: NYT), I'm headed south to talk with this impressive bunch of journalists and writers about building community.

First thing I'm going to do is tell Peter Roybal of Yahoo News that Lloyd Braun's quote about ego is proof that we proverbial old dogs can learn new tricks - tricks anyone who wants to grow a thriving community online has to learn. (Click through on the NYT link above to read what Braun said).

I'm very complimented that Robert Niles, Editor of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, invited me to join this discussion at OJR 2006. My job is to moderate a conversation in which, Robert says,

"We will talk about how journalists are building and managing online communities of readers to extend and deepen their sites' reporting, through discussion boards, wikis, blogs and other forms of interactive publishing. Discussion topics will include how best to solicit new contributors and how to manage those who grow unruly."

Ah yes -- the unruly. More on the unruly in a minute. What I'd like to accomplish tomorrow is a group problem-solving exercise where we can talk about how and when working with users improves the quality of journalism, why this space is so hot, and how to solve the problems everyone in the room is dealing with daily. Here's my working outline for our 90 minutes together, with the understanding that the group controls the agenda (and I welcome all suggestions below)...

1. Ground rules - Let's agree how to disagree so that we can dig in asap. What do people need to speak up?

2. Survey of the group in the room: Why are we--or aren't we--involving communities in journalism?

What are our Incentives for working with readers? How about for not working with readers? Let's be honest about our pressures to deliver eyeballs, more traffic, the latest hot technological thing as well as quality journalism, competitive use of technology, better information and more accurate sourcing.

3. How are we doing? Let's name the elephant(s) in the room and beat them into submission.

What successes, questions and problems are we having with building communities? What answers and solutions can the group offer each other? Let's talk frankly about

• Soliciting contributors
• Failure
• Success
• Losing (or sharing) the story to the competition
• Advertisers
• Chain of command
• Community behavior (topic, type of interaction)
• ...and, last but not least, fear of the unruly

A few people attending this meeting above know from unruly. And I imagine not everyone agrees with Lisa Williams, braintrust of h20town, who says "Troll patrol is my idea of fun." Indeed, LAObserved's Kevin Roderick (http://laobserved.com, http://americassuburb.com) took such abuse that he closed comments. Meanwhile, Darleene Powells (http://www.darleeneisms.la, http://www.cbs2.com) is finding that her readers, once hooked, get cranky without their daily fix of Darleenisms. At the same time, the room includes plenty of people who do work directly with their communities. Mack Reed is working with readers to cover the FAA's safety standards in America's most-crowded airspace. Dan Gillmor, who knows a thing or two about flak himself, has a new site where Andrew Lih has been watching how citizen journalism is changing the flow of information in countries such as Brazil and Thailand, where free speech is not protected. And Laurie Niles, (yep, married to Robert) head-honchos one of the Web's most addicted communities, The Violinist.

If you'll be there, I look forward to meeting you. If you won't, I welcome you to weigh in. Thanks.

Comments

[Jon Garfunkel]

Lisa -- Sorry I didn't end up making it out. It appears I just missed your panel just now.

My input on conversations would be to ensure that publishers know exactly what they want. As I wrote in Code of Conversations following the WaPo blow-up, one can strive for social conversations for rational/constructive conversations. The latter is more focussed and may require more active moderation. The upshot is that they lead to more constructive conversations to make points (e.g., letters to the editor).

It seems to many that the Internet "ought to be" or "is inherently" about social conversations, and this leads to the "anything goes" mindset. But that may not be what publishers want. -- Jon

[Rod Amis]

Lisa,

Though I was there, I've never been much of a "chime in" type. ;-) Thought you did an excellent job moderating this discussion.

(Overall, I wished throughout the day that more discussion had been devoted to the actual work of journalism, as you imply in both numbers 2 & 3 above.

(I felt that we were all remiss in not addressing head-on Larry Pryor's comment about J-School students not seeing real career potential in online journalism, for example.)

I agree with Mr. Garfunkel's comment here. The issue of interaction has a lot to do with the type of community we want to engender.

Cheers!
Rod