“There are various ways to shape the conversation but you should give the public the voice if they want to speak” – there is no doubt that virtual communities are becoming a regular part of today’s news making landscape. People enjoy being connected to journalists but that doesn’t mean they will always leave nice comments. On the second day of the International Journalism Festival in Perugia the guests on the panel hosted by Justin Peters from the Columbia Journalistic Review discussed to what extent listening and letting the audience participate in journalistic processes is the future of news and how to make the best out of it.
The first question to be answered in the panel in Sala Raffaello of the Hotel Brufani was how much moderation should take place in community debates. Charlie Beckett, director of the POLIS think tank at the London School of Economics claimed that although each newspaper should decide which kind of conversation it wishes to have, in his opinion the best option is to leave the discussions be as free as possible as this generates a natural loyalty of the community. Journalists have to be prepared though – people are intelligent but they are also angry, added Mark Johnson, the community editor at The Economist. “Filthy” comments are a normal part of the conversations.
Johnson explained further what the newspaper did to foster intelligent and wider discussions in the community. Besides introducing some technical improvements in order to facilitate the participation like easier login or shorter registration process, The Economist also reached out to social media sites and there the newspaper quickly reached over a million of fans. Social media enabled Economist to broaden its audience and its perspectives while maintaining a high level of the debate. There is more to that – currently ten percent of traffic to the website is generated by social media only.
But how can a journalist profit from its community? According to Charlie Beckett one should consider that the public not only gives its opinions but is very often a resource of information and access to materials. The audience becomes a part of an extended journalistic process, he added. People like being listened to, said Johnson and admitted that the journalists at The Economist are actually going through the comments on a regular basis.
Also Lucy Chambers from the Open Knowledge Foundation, an organization building open source tools aiming at facilitating the aggregation of free knowledge, stressed how much the core staff of the organization profits from several thousands of people involved in the community projects.
Mark Johnson summed up the conversation by saying that while in the next future news organizations will become smaller and smaller, it’s the community that should be put at the heart of the journalistic work.
Kasia Odrozek