Nieman Journalism Lab |
- For once, Nick Denton seems pleased with Gawker’s commenting system
- From Nieman Reports: A look inside the BBC’s verification hub
- Moving mobile: ReadWriteWeb chooses responsive design over a native iPhone app
| For once, Nick Denton seems pleased with Gawker’s commenting system Posted: 10 Jul 2012 01:22 PM PDT
I’m starting to lose track of which system Gawker is using for comments today, so here is a brief timeline of the evolution of Gawker’s discussion platform:
Why do we care so much about Gawker’s comments? Because the CEO of a publishing machine that generates 7–15 million pageviews a day is obsessed with them. Denton has said again and again he wants to treat comments as content, not metadata attached to content. He wants to kill the trolls and the snark. He wants the comments to be an inviting place for primary sources to join the discussion. Something happened over the weekend that looked a lot like Denton’s fantasy coming true. Matt Hardigree, the editor in chief of Jalopnik, reviewed a review of the Tesla Model S by the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Neil. Hardigree argued the seasoned auto critic failed to do his job by lobbing unanswered questions about the car at the reader — questions Tesla should have answered. At the end of the post, Hardigree invited invited Neil to respond in the comments (and invited him again, privately, in a Facebook message). And Neil does — artfully dismantling Hardigree’s argument point by point, in 1,300 words, while managing to write an extended review of the vehicle inside his rebuttal. Neil closes:
Dan Neil is no Brian Williams, but surely Denton is satisfied: Here is the establishment, wallowing with the groundlings. I emailed Denton last night to ask him if this is what Kinja success looks like. He replied with a laundry list of other “successful conversations” from just the past three weeks. With the old system, he wrote, “I would have been pressed to find you one a year.”
I take that as a yes, Denton is satisfied. For his part, Hardigree said he enjoyed the Dan Neil discussion. “Most of our writers and editors (myself included) came to us because they were readers/commenters at one point, which is the best argument I can make for continuing to break down the barriers between the two camps,” he told me. Not every staffer is so happy to dive in to the comments, not the least of whom is Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio, who described Gawker comments in April as “a tar pit of hell.” Any journalist writing for a highly trafficked website knows what a miserable time suck that can be. But that’s their job now. Gawker staffers are essentially professional commenters now — or maybe commenters are amateur bloggers. Denton does not even like the word “comments.” Supposedly he imposed a $5 penalty for any employee heard using the word. “These are posts,” Denton told the Observer in June. Not all commenters are happy, either. And who would expect them to be? Something changed on the Internet. The other day Jezebel had to warn the masses: “Don’t feed the trolls.” One dissatisfied Kotaku commenter created a Google Chrome extension that restores the previous design, which makes it easier to skim all replies to a thread. The Chrome store says 7,500 people are using that extension, and a small development community has sprung up around it. But those are not the kind of users Denton wants in the comments, people who come just to skim. He wants readers to be generators, too. Photo of cake featuring likeness of Nick Denton made up of faces of Gawker commenters by Raj Taneja used under a Creative Commons license |
| From Nieman Reports: A look inside the BBC’s verification hub Posted: 10 Jul 2012 09:47 AM PDT Editor’s Note: Our colleagues upstairs at Nieman Reports are out with their Summer 2012 issue, “Truth in the Age of Social Media,” which focuses on issues like verification, crowdsourcing, and citizen journalism. Over the next few days, we’ll give you a glimpse at some of their stories — but make sure to read the issue in full. In this piece, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the BBC’s User-Generated Content (UGC) Hub.
The soldiers — a number dressed, incongruously, in sneakers — appear to reply with gloating taunts. But they are mainly concentrating on the job at hand: covering the victim’s head in earth. They do their grisly job well; in less than a minute his head is completely buried. The video then ends abruptly — the rest is silence. One rain-swept morning in April, Trushar Barot, assistant editor at the BBC’s User-Generated Content (UGC) Hub in London’s rather bleakly monolithic BBC Television Centre, was studying the anonymously posted footage on YouTube. His Twitter feed was buzzing with news of the clip. Jon Williams, the BBC’s world news editor, had also raised it at the 9 o’clock news meeting. What everyone wanted to know, on Twitter and in the newsroom, was this: Was the video real or fake? That is the kind of question the Hub is there to investigate. Started in 2005 to sift through unsolicited contributions previously perused by many different teams, the Hub has grown to a complement of 20 staffers. Initially, the team focused heavily on images, footage and eyewitness accounts e-mailed to the BBC, but in the past few years people have become much more prone to distribute material themselves through Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. As a result, the number of contributions proffered to the BBC has declined to about 3,000 a day, and the Hub’s task has moved toward semi-conventional newsgathering with a Web 2.0 twist. Staffers now use search terms, see what’s trending on Twitter, and look at the images and footage trusted contacts are discussing on their Twitter streams. Keep reading at Nieman Reports » |
| Moving mobile: ReadWriteWeb chooses responsive design over a native iPhone app Posted: 10 Jul 2012 09:29 AM PDT
RWW is working on a site revamp that’ll employ the same fluid, shape-shifting qualities we’ve seen on BostonGlobe.com. The responsive approach, which allows pages to snap to the proper screen size and orientation regardless of device, has caught on with media companies because it allows them to serve the desktop and mobile audiences with the same code base and eliminates the need to build custom apps for every new significant phone or tablet platform. Apps still have their place, but mobile web is gaining as the default option for developers. “We have a simple rule: if we can do it in a browser, we use a browser,” Alex Schleifer, general manager of the media lab at SAY Media (which owns ReadWriteWeb) told me. “If we can't, well, then we consider building an app. We're look at cases where we need access to the camera or location services and for that we're building native apps.” As indicators continue to show we’re going more mobile, publishers are adjusting their strategy to find the best way to serve that audience. And, as it turns out, they’re learning more about their audience’s reading preferences. For ReadWriteWeb, more readers tend to look at the site’s content through the iPhone’s Safari browser than from its iPhone app. And tablets, led overwhelmingly by the iPad, are the fastest growing segment of RWW’s audience. Schleifer is overseeing the site’s redesign. Over email he told me they’re not abandoning apps, just focusing on a delivery method that’s available on every platform:
It’s also a weapon against fragmentation: both by new platforms and the increasing variety (in screen sizes, in resolution, in shape) within platforms. “It's a single template that behaves accordingly on different devices so while you're tweaking for specific ones you can be more or less sure that it will adapt to any of the hundreds of models coming out,” he emailed. “Samsung's Note or even the Kindle Fire. We didn't build for those devices but our templates work because they're built to be responsive.” Schleifer said RWW is building for responsive images (for those lovely new Retina-class displays) and for orientation awareness. They’re also experimenting, he said, with “complex gestures and even measuring the tilt in some cases.”
There are still issues — they’re debating how to deal with offline reading — but RWW is confident this approach is where to be investing. “I think that, when you're looking at content consumption, mobile browsers are more than capable to provide an excellent experience,” Schleifer wrote. |
A group of soldiers speaking Arabic shovel sand into a pit while a disembodied voice wails. After a few seconds it becomes apparent that the desperate voice is coming from a man buried in the trench; the head alone is visible. 
When | You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |