Towards quality discourse in online news comments

With the growth in sociality and interaction around online news media, news sites are increasingly becoming places for communities to discuss and address common issues spurred by news articles. The quality of online news comments is of importance to news organizations that want to provide a valuable exchange of community ideas and maintain credibility within the community. In this work we examine the complex interplay between the needs and desires of news commenters with the functioning of different journalistic approaches toward managing comment quality. Drawing primarily on newsroom interviews and reader surveys, we characterize the comment discourse of SacBee.com, discuss the relationship of comment quality to both the consumption and production of news information, and provide a description of both readers’ and writers’ motivations for usage of news comments. We also examine newsroom strategies for dealing with comment quality as well as explore tensions and opportunities for ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: Nicholas Diakopoulos, Mor Naaman
• Keywords: Comment Quality, CSCW 2011, Keywords Commenting Systems, Online Discourse Acm, Social Sciences