CITIZENS MEDIA SUMMIT October 24, 2005 University of Maryland, College Park Supported by: The Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation

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OVERVIEW

All citizens media initiatives entail a level of community management that is very different from newsroom management. Citizens need to be educated about the various ways they can participate, encouraged to participate, and be thanked when they do so. Citizens need to feel enough of an attachment to the emerging enterprise to police any misbehaving interlopers and news organizations need to be willing to put on the brakes if discussions get too heated or uncivil. Overall, while mainstream journalists have voiced concern about the potential for improper citizen content, few problems have surfaced and they have been managed with various interventions from editors.

Chris Muldrow, content director for Internet operations at Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. based in Birmingham, Ala., is the former editor of Fredericksburg.com, a robust site owned by The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star in Virginia. He now oversees Web sites for his company's 130 newspapers. His sites lead with stories by professional journalists, then allow space for reader comments.

A big component are the community forums, which first launched at Fredericksburg.com. At CNHI, the online staff built a standard content platform for all of the company's Web sites. The platform was designed to make it easy for users to post comments and interact on discussion forums, while also making it simple for local newspaper staff to moderate and edit content.

The local sections are all run through a central CNHI forum, allowing moderators from both the local newspapers and CNHI to edit content. Muldrow said this allows CNHI to help the small newspapers that do not have the manpower to fully moderate their discussions.

He gave several recommendations based on his experience at Fredericksburg.com and CNHI, including:

• Decide ahead of time what the goals of the forums are and what is acceptable in posts.
• Don't use a profanity filter. Users tend to see that as an invitation to work around the filter and use words that represent profanities. He said that when there is no filter, the community self-moderates and finds a tone that it is comfortable with. The CNHI forums do offer a "family-friendly" section where users are asked not to use profanity.
• Know that "trolls" who attempt to annoy people and incite arguments will be your biggest headache. However, Muldrow said that eventually the community becomes very savvy and can identify trolls after just a few posts, which will help to weed them out.
• Use word-of-mouth to drive people to your forums. It's free, but be patient because it takes time to increase traffic.
• Don't pre-edit but be prepared to remove offensive posts. He recommended locking offensive threads so that no one else can post on them, then posting an explanation of why the thread was locked.

"We did have to pull forums off the site for six months in Fredericksburg because we hit a comfort-level problem that we couldn't surpass," he said.

The biggest problems Muldrow saw on forums arose when posters got too personal, sometimes because they already knew each other. CNHI's sites do not guarantee privacy to their users; all that is collected on registration is an e-mail address so there is not much information to give to people filing complaints.

Muldrow said he sees the forums as eventually creating revenue through classifieds and private party text ads. "If you converse with someone on the boards for three months and you find out they're selling a refrigerator, you might be more willing to buy from them," he said.

Besides forums, CNHI's content platform offers polling, blog tools and a community calendar. Muldrow said that CNHI plans to improve the calendar feature so that people can call in with events and have them listed immediately on the Web site, then eventually in print editions.

Mary Lou Fulton, founder of NorthwestVoice.com, said the site prints everything to the Web first, then publishes the best information in a print edition every other week. Key to the site's success is that its developers understand the people who live in the Bakersfield, Calif., community. The target audience is homeowners with children in grades K-12. Most contributions come from the community, though editors have sought out some columnists to write regularly for the site, Fulton said.

Before the site launched in May 2004, Fulton and her staff made a list of people they thought were likely to participate, met with them and explained the concept. "I think it was that personal outreach in the early going that really paved the way for some of our later success," she said.

Fulton credited the print edition with boosting contributions and traffic to the Web site. "The print edition ... is a huge motivator. People get that great feedback from their family and friends about the articles and the pictures and it creates so much good will," she said. "And people in the community then become evangelists for us."

Asked how she measures success, Fulton said she looks at the number of contributors and the depth and variety of contributions. "If participation is too narrow and it's always the same people, you lose the diversity of the voices," she said.

• Know your community.
• Give people "something to hang onto," something with which they can participate.
• Keep it simple. Make it fast and easy so that people are not discouraged from contributing.
• Make contributors the stars.
• Be an active community leader.

Fulton said that since planning began on NorthwestVoice.com two years ago, she has learned several lessons and discovered some things about participation in media:

• Participation works. "It's a model that works for us, but it does take thought and structure and effort to make it happen," she said.
• The print edition is a big part of success because it motivates people to contribute, makes marketing easier and brings in revenue.
• You need staffers who are open to a new kind of journalism and are passionate about the community. People who you have to talk into participation and community journalism are not going make good staff members.
• Contributors and columnists will come and go because it is a volunteer effort. You need a large enough stable of people to make it sustainable.
• The quality of community-contributed content is better than expected.
• The contributors like to be edited, but they will feel foolish if they submit something and it does not get posted. They appreciate the time the staff puts into the submissions.
• In the beginning, you have to bug people to send stuff in. Later, you have to bug people to make sure there is a good mix of content. "This community management really is essential to the ongoing quality and breadth of the participation," she said.

Hillary Rhodes, former editor of YourMom and YourMomOnline.com, owned by the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, led the teen-driven publication for its launch in 2004. Almost all the content is written by teens from local high schools. Rhodes, who recently left YourMom to join the Associated Press' new asap project, aimed at attracting 18- to 34-year-olds, said young people felt most comfortable writing first-person opinions for YourMomOnline.com.

The print edition, a 16-page weekly, served as a display of the best content from the Web site and was distributed at teen hangouts such as malls, book stores and cafes.

In addition to giving teenagers a place to voice their opinions and discuss subjects that interested them, YourMom also provided young people a link to the local newspaper, Rhodes said. As many as 50 teenaged contributors regularly visited Rhodes in her office, which was in the Times newsroom, and became comfortable in a newspaper environment, she said. Rhodes also posted her own personal, insider's view of YourMom. Through that, she said, her readers grew to know her. "Because I had a personal relationship with them, they all trusted me," she said.

Rhodes' staff at YourMom included an online editor who was also responsible for the Quad-City Times content, two teenaged interns and a teenaged photographer.

She said that at first, the Times staff was not very welcoming to the teen presence, but eventually they got used to it and the marketing staff would even come in to get leads on potential advertisers from the teens.

• Care about them as people, not just as writers.
• Include them in discussions of the larger product, not just their stories.
• Foster a community of writers.
• Reward them with constructive criticism, sincere compliments.

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