Guardian community moderator Todd Nash (a former student of mine) makes an interesting suggestion on his blog about the difficulties journalists face in wading through comments on their stories:
“There is potential for news stories to come out of user activity on newspaper Web sites. Yet, as far as I know, it is not a particularly well-utilised area. Time is clearly an issue here. How many journalists have time to scroll through all of their comments to search for something that could well resemble a needle in a haystack?
“It was commented that, ironically, freelancers may make better use of this resource as their need for that next story is greater than their staff member counterparts.
“The moderation team at guardian.co.uk now has a Twitter feed @GuardianVoices which highlights good individual comments and interesting debate. Could they be used as a tool to collect potential leads? After all, moderators will already be reading the majority of content of the publication they work for. However, it would require a rather different mindset to look out for story leads compared to the more usual role of finding and removing offensive content.”
Could it work for moderators to identify leads? Which journalists are already using comments to generate sources and story ideas?
