Many news organizations have been trying to build their Web audiences by allowing online discussions or comments about the news. But they’re also struggling to keep comments from deteriorating into flame wars, profanity, racism and other forms of ugliness. They want the engagement and online traffic that community conversations can generate, but they want to do it as inexpensively as possible — which is a big part of their problem.
Topix, a technology startup now majority-owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, offers a potential solution: a turnkey discussion/commenting system with technology features that promise to reduce the challenges of managing those conversations. But I wonder: Is outsourcing online community a good idea?
Last week, Topix announced that it had signed a deal with MediaNews Group to be the “preferred provider” of forums and online commenting capabilities for the company’s 50+ daily newspapers, which include the San Jose Mercury News and the Denver Post. These papers will join most Tribune newspapers and a number of Gannett Corp. sites on the Topix platform.
Topix CEO Chris Tolles told Online Journalism Review that for a newspaper, a Topix partnership is “a no-brainer… They get content up without any work on their part. There’s additional ad inventory. And there are opportunities down the road for them to actually integrate their journalism and the commentary — using forums as a place to get stories, to take the pulse of the community.”
Indeed, Topix offers some interesting positives for a local news organization:
- Topix already hosts active online conversations about the news in thousands of towns and neighborhoods. (Topix is a news aggregation site, using technology to segment the news by topic, by city/neighborhood name and also by zip code.) Topix is handling 80,000 comments per day, Tolles told me in an interview last week.
- It’s easy to integrate Topix comments into an existing news site. “Seven lines of Javascript code,” Tolles said. For an example of how this integration works, check out this article from the Indianapolis Star.
- More traffic and ads. Tolles pointed out that the partnership model generates additional page views for media partners — as well as additional ad inventory that a partner can sell.
- Topix provides technologies that many news organizations have not built themselves — for instance, to block spam comments and to monitor IP addresses so people who repeatedly post offensive comments can be banned from participating further.
- To respond to complaints about inappropriate posts, Topix employs a full-time staff of four. A partner site can augment this capability by devoting its own staff to reviewing comments and user complaints.
Still, I would argue that for news organizations, building online community should be more than an outsourced service. I’d go so far as to say that cultivating community is the most important step for news media to take in order to build online engagement. By partnering with Topix, news organizations are essentially making a statement that online discussions are not important enough to build technology and staffing capabilities around.
Tolles says there’s nothing to prevent a Topix partner from using the company’s tools while providing more active leadership and moderation of the online discussions. “Newspapers can integrate this in a way that we can’t,” Tolles said.
But he also acknowledged that newspapers are having trouble adapting to a world where users can freely comment on the news.
“The entire cultural and professional desire of the newspaper editor is to control and decide what will and will not be published,” Tolles told me. “It’s not like newspapers couldn’t do this themselves, but it seems to be something that editors have a real problem with.”
UPDATE DEC. 10: Chris Tolles and Howard Owens debate the value of Topix’s technology for the newspaper industry.
