Internet comment sections have a bad reputation. Here be trolls and not much else. Can readers have engaging dialogue below the line? Often the conversation is derailed by your typical trollish regulars: the self-appointed grammar police who comb articles for spelling or grammer miztakes, the TL;DRs who are enraged by the headline but don't actually bother to read the article, those who are motivated by disrupting a stable online community, and those who just want to be starting something.
Aside from online incivility, another obvious deterrent is the journalist's lack of interaction with their audience. While many journalists appear to acknowledge the value of a comment section (Newspaper Journalists Support Online Comments, Carolyn Nielsen, 2012), most don't dive in and talk to the reader (Coproduction or cohabitation: Are anonymous online comments on newspaper websites shaping news content?, Carolyn Nielsen, 2014). It can seem as though the activity below the line is an afterthought, tacked onto the journalistic piece to ensure clickthroughs (Beneficial yet crappy: Journalists and audiences on obstacles and opportunities in reader comments, Annika Bergstrom and Ingela Wadbring, 2014).
With these factors in mind, there is also the opinion that readers are moving away from commenting on news websites and taking it to social media, namely Facebook and Twitter. And some think this is a good thing. In a recent interview with Niemen Labs, influential technology journalist Kara Swisher said: "We believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years". This was after the decision to close the comment section on Re/Code, the tech website she started with Walt Mossberg after leaving the Wall Street Journal.
The replacement? Re/code says it is prominently placing journalists' Twitter profiles alongside articles and also encouraging readers to email them directly, the latter of which strikes me as a little old-school but ho-hum.
There are other options. Some media platforms are reinventing the comment section. Digg, for one, has recently introduced a new feature called Digg Dialog. This is more in the spirit of participatory journalism that one-to-one emails while keeping the conversation in one place rather than losing it to the multitudinous threads and subthreads of Twitter replies.
Digg COO Gary Liu sums it up: “Wouldn’t it be great to talk about these articles with the journalists who wrote them, or the people they’re about?” And so Digg editors handpick the popular, noteworthy or interesting articles, contact the author and invite them to have a live, pre-moderated conversation with readers.
Michael Erard of the New York Times has previously written about the need for "rethinking the relationship between creators and commenters in more fundamental ways," citing annotation as a viable option because commenters are more likely to actually read the text if they have to choose a specific section to comment on.
Medium uses annotation in this manner. In order to join in the conversation the reader must highlight the sentence they wish to comment on or respond to. This feature, known as Highlights, is ostensibly a more effective way for the writer to engage meaningfully with the audience because he or she "instantly know[s] the most powerful line in your writing".
Why do we need these new platforms for engagement? Because as you read this, another comment section has probably been closed down with the reasoning that it is toxic, time-consuming or bad for science as was the case for Popular Science when it shut down comments in 2013: "we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter," said then digital editor, Suzanne LaBarre.
But where does this leave said lively, intellectual debate? Facebook comments are below the stories, meaning that journalists rarely see them. Twitter conversations are more often than not directly attached to the author and are more likely to derail into the personal. Neither foster online civility (for those who say Facebook's real name policy makes trolling less likely, they have not had to read the comments below a story they have written. Trust me, it can get ugly, real name or no) nor do they provide a central platform where the journalist is more likely to jump into the conversation.
If quality engagement between journalist and reader is a priority then online newspapers will have to consider a strategy beyond farming the conversation out to third party social media. Either the comment section has a dedicated community manager and the willingness of the journalist to take part, or we need to look to these new models of online conversation as, one by one, the lights goes out below the line.
