1) the people you think might be interested, aren’t. One of our most voracious commenters (and a frequent critic) has stopped commenting compeltely. After an initial willingness to engage in a conversation, they stopped talking to us at all. Is that because they don’t like being asked about their opinions? Don’t want to accept that we might have a different view? Sinply preferring trolling? Or is it because they think our responding to their comments is unwanted intrusion? I have no idea which it is.

2) There might be some things that actually shouldn’t be discussed in public. Yesterday one of our readers took offence to the removal of comments on a story about a grieving family. The comments were about what causes road accidents in the place where a young man died.
Our policy is that comments are only open on those stories to allow people to place tribute. Normally we’d post that at the foot of the story when it’s uploaded: on this occasion it was accidentally left off and I had to post it in retrospect.

One reader took this as a personal affront and developed our Twitter “discussion” into accusations about whether grieving families should talk to the press.

I felt, rightly or wrongly, that giving that reader details of how we came to speak to said family wasn’t really appropriate in a public forum: it’s none of their business if they choose to come forward to speak.The reader, though, assumed that my refusal to engage in an argument meant that the family didn’t come forward and that we must have obtained the quotes by underhand means.

So what to do? Our integrity is being questioned, in public, but I can’t defend us in a dignified fashon. In the end I offered to speak to the reader face to face, they called me a hypocrite for not being able to take criticism.

And finally, and most unexpectedly, 3). If people are used to a chatty, social, entertaining Twitter feed, they might take offence when you post serious news.

We didn’t really post much on twitter yesterday about the tragic deaths of a family in Fordingbridge. The RSS feed posted an initial story, then we tweeted when the family were named, because the updated story wouldn’t feed through the RSS.
We also tweeted to say we had video footage from the scene going online – it was a policeman giving a statement and some reaction from the town; less in fact than had been on the rolling news channels all day.
Some of our readers felt Twitter was not the place for such news. Which made me think. We didn’t treat it any differently than any other news story. But should we have? Do people expect different things from the news they get from Twitter? Does adding detail make you seem in some way ghoulish? Is it because of the specific kind of story?

I’d be very interested to hear any thoughts about any of these points. Twitter has not been my friend this week but hopefully we can learn something, even if it’s just when to keep our mouth shut.

My presentation was about building online communities, and the concept of the reader plus – the elusive category of cheerleader readers: demanding customers, but the most effective marketing you could ever ask for.

The slides from the presentation are here and the post where I first came up with the lamer-the-more-I-hear-other-people-say-it “readers plus” is here.

bournemouthecho.tumblr.com
flickr.com/bournemouthecho
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twitter.com/bournemouthecho
facebook.com/bournemouthecho (my work profile)
facebook.com/bournemouthdailyecho (our Facebook page)
We also have a pretty neglected YouTube account at youtube.com/bournemouthecho, and of course there’s the comments at bournemouthecho.co.uk.

As a result of chatting with fellow web types about Facebook (main lesson learned there – no-one really knows how best to use it!) I’ve made some changes to our pages and profiles, which have doubled the number of the clickthroughs we’re getting.

They were really straightforward changes, so I thought I’d outline them for anyone who might be interested.

First: RSS Graffiti for Facebook – the best way to feed your news to Facebook, whether you’re cheating with a profile (of which more in a second) or using a fan page. It looks pretty and it doesn’t dump all your stories at once, but in relatively real time to when you post them.

Second: we had been using a profile, simply because the only way to actively find and friend people on Facebook is to have a profile. We’d set this up in the paper’s name, not mine, because I wanted the paper online to be it’s only personality and not connected to a specific person. However. This is generally frowned upon and people who are sussed out can have their accounts closed down without warning.

So I invited all our friends to “like” our page. Almost all did. I changed the name of the profile to Bournemouth Echo Sam (the name change had to be approved by Facebook) and started using it to share news links fed through to our fan page.

I also turned off the link that fed all our Twitter updates to our profile page, to stop all the news stories being replicated.

The page changes have been massively successful, although I’m finding that the best way of generating interaction with our posts is to comment or like them myself.

The profile changes have changed the way other people on Facebook treat me – because they can see I’m a real person now I’m being approached a lot more, on chat and by email. It’s more time consuming – if I want a story from the paper to appear on my profile I have to remember to manually post it – but with more than 70,000 potential fans in the Bournemouth network, it’s got to be worth the effort.

But I’ve NEVER clicked one. Why? I don’t trust their integrity. They run alongside the ubiquitous take this pill to be thin and 1 tip of a flat belly adverts, and I have no confidence that the link I’m about to click will take me somewhere sound. I wouldn’t trust these advertisers with my money.

Second thing: Here’s an advertising policy from an American blog, describing how they choose (yes, choose) their advertisers and sponsors.

First, they need to have been recommended by a reader, client or industry professional. We don’t simply look for a referral but rather for a passionate reason as to why a particular vendor deserves to be in the book. Whatever the connection, it must be strong and based on a real knowledge of the vendor’s work.

Second, we dive head first into the vendor’s business. Their portfolio, their experience, their time in the industry. We look at press that they’ve received, we chat with their industry neighbors, we get to know who they are and why they are good at what they do.

We spend time…. getting to know them, figuring out if they are honest, have a high level of integrity and are truly devoted to their craft. For highly competitive industries, like photography, we also have vetting teams. An unbiased group of vendors who can fairly, objectively, and accurately evaluate other’s work.

If you have had a negative experience with any of the vendors listed, please let us know as soon as possible. Your name will remain anonymous and we will take your issues very seriously. If we find that indeed the vendor has violated what we believe to be good, honest work ethics, they will be removed from the site immediately and any advertising dollars will be refunded.

That’s a pretty firm commitment – but one that I’d say increases the chances of readers clicking those ads dramatically.

People talk a lot about curating in journalism, a new attitude to news gathering and distributing, being a place readers trusts to sift through the web and find them the solid gold good stuff.

So what if you applied that logic to advertising?

What if your food pages had a similar list of producers that your knowledgeable food writers had checked out? Or even restaurants or coffee shops? What if your leisure pages had a similar list of hotels? What if your online readers knew that they wouldn’t see fat-busting ads but instead the logos of reputable local trainers?

Just a thought….

 But as a person who “community manages” I’ve been thinking about this for a while.

It’s about commenters on our site and what responsibility we have to moderate them.

On the one hand, she’s entirely correct. Comments on this story started badly and got worse.

On the other hand, none of the points she suggests are we in a position to implement. Our moderation policy (in that we don’t moderate) is dictated by group-wide legal advice. We can’t require people to register with their real names as we have absolutely no means of checking whether they’re telling us the truth.

Point four we do of course stick to, with the proviso that we don’t moderate, so we can only act when something is drawn to our attention.

Point one, the community manager, is in many ways what I do, although it’s not my job description and not a position that would be recognised by anyone else in our newsroom. I also don’t work 24 hours a day.

Point two – have reporters respond to comments – is a brilliant idea in theory but in practice is hard to implement (willingness, experience, confidence all being factors here, in management as well as reporters).

In an ideal world, you see, I’d post a response to her blog. But I’m not sure what I’d say. Is she right? Probably. Is there anything I can do about it? Not at all.

My  post asking why our live blogs weren’t working got more comments than all the liveblogs put together.

And the responses have been a bit of an eye opener:

I would suggest that people would like to discuss the major issues, not the periphery issues. Specifically, staffing levels, salaries and staff pensions which I assume are the biggest element of Council expenditure by a country mile.

Because the council’s mind is already made up, never mind the ‘consultations, they know what they are going to do and they will do it.

And my personal favourite….

This needs to be run and controlled by an organization that has both the skills and knowledge to do a consultation in this way. With respect to the Echo I don’t think they have such skill and knowledge.

I’m not sure what any of this means for us and future liveblogs. But the strength of feeling against the council has been quite a surprise.

You can read the rest of the comments here

We tried an experiment this week. Three lunchtime live webchats focusing on Bournemouth Borough Council’s proposed budget cuts.

We spent a lot of time thinking about the best time and structure for these blogs – the council had asked us to help get people involved in the budget consultation, and we were happy to do so. It’s your money, after all, it’s only right that you have a say in how it’s spent.

So we decided on three blogs focusing on specific subject areas. A councillor and council officer would come in each day to answer questions and respond to comments.

We posted a story about each blog, with a form for submitting questions if you weren’t able to be there live. We also made sure each story had details about exactly what cuts were being considered.

And we chose lunchtime because our previous experiences with evening blogs had not been very successful.

The response, however was underwhelming. Even Cllr Stephen MacLoughlin putting in an appearance on Thursday wasn’t enough to provoke a response.

Today’s blog, about cutting funding for ASBOs, stopping closing drug dens because it costs too much and switching off the town’s CCTV cameras, was cancelled because not a single question was posted.

Reader numbers for the blogs never made it out of the “few dozen”. So we’d like to know why.

Is it the format? The time? Are you not interested in the budget options? Do you think it’s not your job to decide? Whatever the feedback, we’d like to hear it. Be constructive, please… we really want to know how we can make these discussions work for you. There’s a form <a href=http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/yoursay/ask_the_echo/> here </a>…

Essentially this week’s discussions have been a very damp squib. The most response we got came from the issue of bowling greens (it costs the taz payers £200 per year per bowler to keep the greens maintained.)

My theory that is people comment, on stories or blogs, only when they feel personally outraged by the subject in question.
Ask for their opinion before a decision is made, and they don’t have one (unless they feel something underhand is happening, of course). But tell them that decision has been made and they’ll be outraged that it wasn’t the choice they wanted.
Or maybe it’s simple apathy about politics and councils in general. Maybe people feel their opnions aren’t needed. Maybe they thought the options in question were so ridiculous they weren’t ever going to get the nod.

Hopefully we’ll have more respsonse to the why than we did to the original blogs… will let you know!

So I’m wondering why that is. It’s not that I don’t have opinions; I do. I have thoughts about restructured newsrooms,  about paywalls, about tweeting the news, engaging with readers – you name it, I’m opinionated about it.

Yesterday I was particularly exercised about Google’s Fast Flip and how all the reaction I’ve seen has been about how it serves newspapers and not how it serves consumers of news (which in the end is surely what will decide if it’s successful  or not?)

Today it’s the way someone in my office has asked me, as a notorious heel wearer, what I think about the TUC wanting to “ban heels from the workplace”, a misinterpretation of the motion written so hilariously about by the Times today that has become “news fact” because a bunch of journalists thought it was funnier to pretend that what’s the TUC wants, so much funnier they completely ignored the quote from the TUC that said that wasn’t what they wanted at all.

But for some reason I’m reluctant to share.

Partly it’s because I know opinions can get you into trouble.

First, Twitter: A brief but unfortunate appearance in UKPG (pre-rising-from-the-dead) reminded me that while I might feel there’s a culture of trust amongst the people I follow, not everyone feels the same way.

You never know who’s reading, or how they might choose to repeat what you say. And yes, I could protect my tweets, but that excludes me from the wider conversation which to me was the point of twitter in the first place.

Then I lost a follower (yes, just the one) for reasons I’m not sure about but can guess at, which for me underlined the futility of having a presence in a media where people might expect me to express an opinion without being able to say what I really think.

And sometimes I find myself agreeing with Steve Jackson’s pov about Twitter and the media. The opinions I find most interesting are often those of non-journalists (because I think Tweeting journos can sometimes suffer from as narrow a world view as those who say the internet is killing newspapers)

Then there’s the difficulty of working in online in a traditional newsroom. I am often frusrated by our approach to, and execution of, news online, but blogging about it will not solve that –although I’m sure others out there would find it informative, if not helpful.

And then there’s my general uncertainty about newspapers and journalism in general. Maybe I’m reading too much Enemies, too much Bad Science. Maybe it’s the way that stories that would be a nib on a printed page get equal billing with leads on a website (especially when you come at a story from a link),  and the way that skews the view of readers about what we as news organisations stand for/care about.

I read the Guardian interview with Max Mosley and agreed with him that his private life is none of our business. I watch Glenn Beck on Fox News and wonder if Fox would be allowed to get away with it here – and then I read something by @antonvowl and wonder if what he’s outling is that we’ve already got our own Fox.

And sometimes I wonder if we’re asking the right questions when it comes to ‘saving journalism’, confusing what has always been a business with our own altruistic notions that we’re a public service.

What if it’s as simple as “what the people want, the people will pay for”? And what if that’s not the kind of reporting we want to do, or think we should be doing?

And I’m tired of the squabbling about if, what and when we load to the web that distracts us from all the exciting, innovative forms of storytelling we could be trying, all the things that digital journalism could and should be.

In short, I’m struggling to find anything nice to say at the moment. I’m feeling picky and prickly about what news I consume and to be brutally truthful quite often I wonder when (not if) I’ll end up doing something else instead.

It may be that all I need is a holiday.  (which is lucky, because I’m about to go on one). It may be that I’m just suffering from plain and simple resistance to change. Or maybe it’s just writer’s block.

Whichever it turns out to be, I’m going to make an effort to resume blogging when I come back from my holiday next month.

Hopefully I’ll find something positive, forward thinking and useful to say. ..