Moving the News Industry From Clickbait to Community

According to our guest on this episode, much of the news industry is engaged in a battle they can’t win, a fight over eyeballs and ad revenue with companies like Google and Facebook, where the terms will get worse and worse as time goes by.

The answer? Community. By building a community that values the work that they create, they can wrestle back some of the control over their audience and receive support directly from the people who consume and appreciate the product they are creating.

Andrew Losowsky is the project lead of The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, that is helping news organizations build better communities and more loyal readers through tools, research and strategy. Among our topics:

Forcing a layer of community over traditional journalism vs. providing newsrooms with a cogent plan Why they are building Talk, an open source comments platform Are news organizations better served by hiring another reporter… or a community pro? Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Higher Logic.

Big Quotes

“[Forcing community on newsrooms] is saying to journalists that they have to spend time in the comments without actually giving them the tools or the training to be able to do so effectively. … It looks like saying, ‘You need to ask your readers for help’ or ‘You need to crowdsource this’ or ‘Why don’t you go and talk to people at this event or in these comments?,’ without actually giving any strategy or thought to it. What you end up with is journalists who are very resentful of having another task placed on top of them. A task where they don’t see the connection between their journalistic work and this community work that they’re being asked to do.” -@losowsky

“If you don’t understand and have a real commitment to community as part of your journalistic mission, as part of the strategy of what you’re trying to achieve in the totality of the newsroom, not just within one corner of the it, then it will, ultimately, always fail. We’ve seen this repeatedly. For me, a little part of me dies when I see that happen because what we’re really missing is the kinds of connections that journalism needs, in order to survive.” -@losowsky

“Community is not a choice. The choice is what you do with it.” -@patrickokeefe

“Right now, so much of the news industry’s revenue model is based around advertising and creating clickbait in order to get the numbers that will then get enough eyeballs on the advertising. I think this is a really shortsighted strategy. … Over half, I think, of the online advertising money goes directly to Facebook and Google. This is not a battle that the news industry is going to win. The terms are going to get worse and worse as you move forward from that. It really is antithetical to community because what you’re saying is, ‘I want people to come here, and I don’t care where they come from.’ Versus trying to build a community who value what we’re doing and will pay for it.” -@losowsky

“If somebody flags a thousand times, and you’ve only ever deleted two of the comments they’ve flagged, then the next time they flag, maybe you don’t bring it straight to the moderator’s attention until somebody, who is more reliable as a flagger, does flag it. Then on the other side of that, if somebody is really good at flagging, if they flag 100 times and 90% of the time they end up flagging something that you end up deleting, they’re as good as our moderators. If they flag something, maybe we should just pull it for the moderator to look at immediately and just not have it there in the stream.” -@losowsky

“The [real name] issue really comes down to whether or not people will behave better because of real names or maybe they will behave worse. If a name sounds like the person might identify as a woman, that can really change and worsen peoples’ behavior towards them. If there’s no way of hiding, if there’s no way of being anonymous, then you could be encouraging a great homogeneity in your community as a result, or/and encouraging different kinds of harassment and abuse.” -@losowsky

About Andrew Losowsky

Andrew Losowsky is originally from the UK and, since the age of 18, has lived in Hong Kong, Spain and now the U.S. In 2003, he became the editorial director of an indie Spanish editorial startup that built communities around original content. Andrew co-ran a biannual festival of independent publishing in Luxembourg, bringing together magazine makers from around the world. He has also been a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and worked on product and editorial at News Corp and The Huffington Post.

He co-created a pop-up magazine (created by a community of people stranded by a volcano), a community museum on a street, a printed time capsule, a human-sized board game about city development and a card game about community management. Andrew used to run an indie magazine subscription service and has written several books about design, print, visualizations and doorbells. He is currently the project lead at The Coral Project.

Related Links Sponsor: Higher Logic, the platform for community managers Andrew’s website Wikipedia page for le cool, an indie Spanish editorial startup where Andrew was editorial director “Colophon 2009: A New Seriousness” by James Pallister for Creative Review, about the biannual festival of independent publishing that Andrew co-ran Stranded, a pop-up magazine co-created by Andrew and a community of people stranged by a volcano The Museum of Westminster Street, a community museum on a street, co-created by Andrew Urbanology, a human-sized board game about city development, co-created by Andrew Cards Against Community, a card game about community management, co-created by Andrew Books authored by Andrew The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, where Andrew is project lead, dedicated to designing “products to meet essential needs of journalism through effective online communities”
Bassey Etim, product manager for community at The New York Times, who was involved in The Coral Project at the earliest stages Greg Barber, director of digital news projects at The Washington Post, who was involved in The Coral Projectat the earliest stages Community Signal episode with Bassey Etim Community Signal episode with Greg Barber Community Signal episode with Mary Hamilton of The Guardian Community Signal episode with Talia Stroud of the Engaging News Project Community Signal episode with Sarah Lightowler of CBC Ask, The Coral Project’s tool which allows you to ask your audience a specific question and then manage and display the responses Community Signal episode with Rachel Medanic, which Andrew cites when talking about the difference between community and engagement “Turning Content Viewers Into Subscribers,” a research paper by Lior Zalmanson and Gal Oestreicher-Singer for MIT Sloan The Information, an online publication that promotes a “high-powered community” as a subscriber-only benefit The Financial Times and The Economist, two outlets that Andrew says are investing heavily in community Talk, The Coral Project’s open source comments and community platform Details on The Coral Project’s plugin architecture Sherloq, which “uses the latest advances in deep learning and natural language processing to detect hate speech and cyber bullying” Sherloq’s plugin for The Coral Project’s Talk Project tracker for The Coral Project’s Talk, showing upcoming features “‘Trust,’ the First App from The Coral Project, Debuts” by The Washington Post PR, about the Trust tool, which allows you to segment community members based upon various data points “How Community Software Can Use Forensic Science to Identify Bad Members” by Patrick Community Signal episode with Heather Merrick, where we discussed the series of videos posted on Facebook, covering a murder that was committed “Facebook Murder Suspect Has ‘Shot and Killed Himself,’ Police Say” by Merrit Kennedy for NPR “Community Standards and Reporting” by Joshua Osofsky, VP, global operations for Facebook, about the company’s response to the videos relating to the murder “Comment Section Survey Across 20 News Sites,” a research study conducted by Talia Stroud, Emily Van Duyn, Alexis Alizor and Cameron Lang for the Engaging News Project, funding by The Coral Project “Social Media Buttons in Comment Sections,” a research study conducted by Talia Stroud for the Engaging News Project, about how “respect” buttons can increase civility in comment sections “The Real Name Fallacy” by J. Nathan Matias, a summary of research related to effects of real name usage on behavior The Coral Project’s research section “Mozilla-The New York Times-The Washington Post Collaboration, The Coral Project, Moves Forward” by Dan Sinker for the Knight Foundation, about the initial funding and the hiring of Andrew Heroku, a cloud platform-as-a-service that is used as a web application development model The Coral Project’s blog The Coral Project Community The Coral Project’s guides, not online at the time of publication, but should be launched soon The Coral Project on Twitter Andrew on Twitter Transcript View the transcript on our website Your Thoughts

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