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BASIC Principles of Online Journalism: C is for Community & Conversation (pt2: Conversation)

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:00:22 +0000

Continuing the final part of this series (part 1: Community is here) I look at conversation. I look at why conversation is becoming a form of publishing itself, why journalists need to be a part of that conversation, and a range of ways they can join in.

Conversation is publishing

In the first dotcom boom it used to be said that ‘Content is King‘. It’s not. As Cory Doctorow points out:

“If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

Jay Rosen, talking about journalism in 2004, noted that it was moving ‘from a lecture to a conversation‘.

And a year later Jeff Jarvis argued “Conversation is the kingdom“:

“In this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.”

Look closer, and you could argue that the distinctions between conversation and publishing in an online medium are being eroded. Everything that we say is recorded, linkable, distributable.

Conversation is publishing.

The one-to-many relationships built by print and broadcast media have been disrupted by the arrival of the internet. By mixing these with the one-to-one cultures of telephony it has created a new, emerging, culture of many-to-many relationships.

For a long time the most popular use of the internet has been email. For the net generation, that is being replaced by social networking and instant messaging. All demonstrate that people don’t want to passively consume content online – they want to use it, produce it, and exchange it.

When the Chinese earthquake (among others) happened, it was reported on social networking sites before news websites. The information moved very quickly from people talking about what was happening to them; to people talking about what was happening to their friends; to people talking about what was happening to their friends’ friends: conversation.

Meanwhile, communities formed to pass on and clarify information more efficiently than the news organisations (for example, translating accounts, mapping, and mashing up). An online journalist who ignores this is ignoring a fundamental element of their job.

Conversation and community are closely linked: any editorial plan involving one is flawed without consideration of the other. Conversation leads to community, but it’s difficult to have a conversation without a community to begin with. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

Blogs are a classic example of generating a community from a conversation. Individual posts can gather global traffic if they touch a nerve, as conversations spread well beyond their points of origin – and back again. But how do you maintain that community when the conversation ends? (Should you even try?)

Building a conversation out of a community is perhaps harder, and why news websites have not always been successful in their attempts to do so. It is like having a room full of people with shared interests but who are too shy to talk.

You need an ice breaker.

The Professional Conversationalist

An online journalist should be a mix of the ideal party guest and the ideal party host, taking part in – and stimulating – conversations in a number of ways:

Be involved in your communities, online and offline. Comment on blogs, post on forums, correct and update wikis, converse on Twitter, join and contribute to social network groups.
Open up your own work for others to contribute editorially: include an email address; allow comments. In particular, don’t structure your work as a dead end: present it as work in progress; ask questions and leave them unanswered; acknowledge gaps in your knowledge; invite contributions there and elsewhere.
Open your work up technically too if possible: make your content portable by providing an RSS feed; widgets users can place on their webpages; wikis for them to edit; or even raw data for mashups.
Not only that, but you must respond to those contributions: That means reading comments on your own work and responding to them, in the comments as well as in the occasional follow-up post. That means looking at who’s linking to your work and posting comments there, or linking to them in your own work with an acknowledgement.
You must show explicitly that you are part of the conversation, by linking to sources (who will in turn know that they are being quoted either through pingback or traffic)
And finally, most importantly: you must listen. That means reading blogs, forums and other media in their sector, and then starting from the beginning again: comment, respond, link, open up.

It’s a conversation loop:

As a journalist, doing all of these things has 4 significant advantages:

Your work will be informed by user contributions, and better for it
You'll be more likely to be 'there' when a story breaks - and to understand the context
As you talk about your work, and involve users in it, you will be distributing it as well. If your motivation is commercial, replace 'conversation' with 'distribution'. Nothing works better online.
Nobody likes a tourist. You'll be building the trust and social capital needed for other users to give you the information that you need - or to help you find it.

Without the help of your community, without an effort to engage in conversation, your work will be one-dimensional, as flat as the paper it used to be printed on. And the journalist who doesn't contribute to their communities and its conversations will look increasingly like Doctorow's sociopath. Not the kind of person people will want to talk to, or read.

Read the full BASIC Principles of Online Journalism series:

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BASIC Principles of Online Journalism: C is for Community & Conversation (pt1: Community)

Paul Bradshaw — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:00:15 +0000

In the final parts of this series I look at two concepts that have become increasingly central to online journalism in the post-Web 2.0 era: community and conversation. I look at why journalists need to understand how both have changed, how they are linked, and how to embrace them in your work processes.

Conversation and community have always been the lifeblood of journalism. Good journalism has always sought to serve a community; commercially, journalism has always needed large or affluent communities to support it. And good journalism – whether informative or sensationalist – has always generated conversation.

Now, in a hyperlinked world, community and conversation are more important than ever.

But they have also changed.

The community is now the media

The bar has been raised.

In a networked world the faceless, passive, amorphous masses of print and broadcast journalism are an anachronism. Journalists can no longer stand outside communities supplying them with information. Communities can supply themselves – and each other – thank you very much:

When your former audience has the same tools as you to publish, publishing isn’t your unique selling point.
When they have access to the same information, newsgathering isn’t your unique selling point.
And when they can pass on news at the click of a button, even distribution isn’t your unique selling point.

When your community has this much power (if this is the Green Ink Brigade they have undergone significant rearmament), you are best advised to stop trying to beat them, and start learning how to join them – or at least form a peaceful alliance.

Journalists need communities more than ever before – not just as buyers, but as active contributors, moderators, and editors: a 21st century ‘news organisation’ doesn’t have walls; it has networks. And persuading users to join your network is one of the biggest challenges facing journalists. For some online journalists, it is becoming the core of their job.

“Community organising IS media”

David Cohn puts it this way:

“It’s often said that the job description for journalists are changing and that part of the new job is ‘community manager’ – sometimes called the ‘network weaver.’

“What they do is organize communities – and while it might not FEEL like media, it is. We may not call them “journalists” but they are helping to inform citizens so they can make decisions in a healthy democracy. They collect, filter and distribute information. Sounds like journalism to me.”

But it’s far from easy, and requires a change of focus.

While news organisations have lost their monopolies on publishing, information and distribution, journalists can still contribute to a community on a number of important fronts:

Time: whereas most users can only contribute to a community in their spare time, a professional journalist employed as a community manager is paid to do the job full time, has more time for ‘social grooming’, and can break Dunbar’s limit on group size. In the 1-9-90 rule, journalists can be part of the 1% who are heavy contributors (the other 9% are occasional contributors, and the final 90% do not contribute).
Experience: for the same reason, journalists – particularly those who move into community management – are likely to have more experience of organising, motivating, and communicating with people (if they haven’t, they need to start building it).
An eye across a number of sectors: journalists cannot always compete on expertise – they are generally paid to be ‘jacks of all trades’, generalists who can move from motoring to business news – but this has its advantages in having contacts across sectors and sometimes seeing the bigger picture.
Financial support: it can be tempting to believe that ‘if you build it, they will come’, to trust in throwing money at technology to serve up a platform that will attract users. But it’s not that simple. A recent study found that despite 6% of commercially built online communities having over $1 million spent on them, “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail.” Why? “Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Businesses [should] spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.”
A brand: think of it as the big 19th century statue in the city centre: not useful in itself, but an obvious landmark to congregate around. News websites have the advantage of thousands of existing users, and so don’t have to build from scratch. But the brand can be as much of a handicap as an advantage. It means users come with a number of preconceptions about your motivations (commercial; mercenary), previous bad experiences, and expectations (what’s in it for me?). These all need to be addressed very early on.

Plug these into community management and there is the potential for success – but this is only part of the picture. Another part is a change in how we see community in the first place.

When is a community a community?

Too often community is used as a synonym for ‘market’. A community of “middle aged upper class readers in Newstown” is not a community: that’s a demographic. “First time dads in Newsdistrict” are more likely to be a community. Indeed, so is “first time dads”, and that’s why magazines seem to have an easier time of this, focusing as they do on:

Communities based on shared passions or hobbies
Communities based on shared beliefs
Communities based on shared employment

But with the web we can go further still:

Communities based on shared history (e.g. school, event)
Communities based on shared problem
Communities based on shared cause

These markets were too small and/or too volatile previously to support a publication – now that’s no longer the case. The costs of publishing online are so low, and the lead-in times so instant, that it has become incredibly easy to set up a publication aimed at a community almost as quickly as that community forms – or even before.

In comparison, the idea of setting up a publication to serve ‘news’ to people living within a 50-mile radius becomes unsustainably generic in an online environment: the individual communities that make up that market can be picked off one by one.

So. All that talk about “serving the community”? Now journalists need to prove they mean it. Through providing information, yes – but also support, tools and platforms, something that Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube woke up to long ago.

Whatever you do, you need to start by joining a community’s conversations.

Read part two: Conversations on Thursday.

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