January, 2020 | Chris Aldrich

Read We're closing Crosscut's comment section. Here's why — and what's next by Ana Sofia Knauf, Anne Christnovich, Mohammed Kloub (crosscut.com)

With the rise of social platforms and an uptick in threatening comments, the newsroom is taking reader engagement in a different direction.

We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.❧

The Disqus data statistics here are fascinating. It also roughly means that those 13 people were responsible for 600+ comments on average or roughly 2 a day every day for the year. More likely it was a just a handful responsible for the largest portion and the others tailing off.

Sadly missing are their data about social media, email, phone, and letters to the editor which would tell us more about how balanced their decision was. What were the totals for these and who were they? Were they as lopsided as the Disqus numbers?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:33PM

In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by:
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It seems like they’ve chose a solution for their community that boils down to pushing the problem(s) off onto large corporations that have shown no serious efforts at moderation either?

Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t seem like a good long term answer. Without aggregating their community’s responses, are they really serving their readers? How is the community to know what it looks like? Where is it reflected? How can the paper better help to shape the community without it?

I wonder what a moderated IndieWeb solution for them might look like?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:42PM

It would be cool if they considered adding syndication links to their original articles so that when they crosspost them to social media, at least their readers could choose to follow those links and comment there in a relatively continuous thread. This would at least help to aggregate the conversation for them and their community while still off-loading the moderation burden from their staff, which surely is part of their calculus. It looks like their site is built on Drupal. I would suspect that–but I’m not sure if–swentel’s IndieWeb Drupal module has syndication links functionality built into it.

Rather than engaging their community, it almost feels to me like they’re giving up and are allowing a tragedy of their commons when there may be some better experimental answers that just aren’t being tried out.

The worst part of this for me though is that they’ve given up on the power of owning and controlling their own platform. In the recent history of journalism, this seems to be the quickest way of becoming irrelevant and dying out.

Read The biggest mistakes to avoid with your ePaper by Mary-Katharine Phillips (Twipe)

In our discussions with publishers, we often notice higher standards applied to websites than ePapers. This is intriguing, knowing the level of reader engagement of the latter, and seeing steady yearly growth of ePapers in the past eight years. Publishers often tell us their ePaper readers are their...

They’re definitely selling a product here, but it sounds like some solid advice. I should take a closer look at some other ePapers to see what the state of the art is. I’m quite curious what the tracking, advertising, and smaller scale surveillance capitalism effects are here.

Quoted The Press in American Politics, 1787–2012 by Patrick Novotny (Praeger (October 14, 2014))

"I run all of my campaigns as if people were watching television with the sound turned down," strategist Karl Rove is known to have said [...]

Listened to Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books by Sean Carroll from preposterousuniverse.com

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what’s on my mind. Since the big event for me in 2019 was the publication of Something Deeply Hidden, I thought it would be fun to talk about the process of writing and selling a popular book. Might be of interest to some of you out there!

Sean, an intriguing episode. It’s great to hear the interesting directions you’d like to move and the sorts of non-physics topics you’re planning on covering. Given some of the areas relating to communication and democracy that you’d like to cover, I might recommend taking a look at a few of the following potential guests:

George Lakoff, a retired Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, has some solid ideas about how we communicate as well as how Donald J. Trump’s speech is influencing our current politics and changing the way that journalism operates in our democracy.

Alan Alda, a science communicator and podcast host of Clear+Vivid and, yes, the well known actor from stage and screen (including M.A.S.H.), who has a long running podcast on the topic of communication and how we communicate. If you’re not listening to it already, it has many of the communication related ideas around who we are, how democracy works through communication, how our tribal tendencies effect the world, etc. (You’ll likely appreciate his podcast in general and may want to mine some of it for guests for your own show.) If you’re able, perhaps do it as a pair of crossover episodes in which you interview him and another in which he interviews you? I think both of your audiences will appreciate such a set of interviews, and you’ll have a chance to do a more extended exploration of both your separate as well as common areas of interests. (There’s also an odd similarity to the theme music for both of your shows…)