Sunday, March 17, 2013

Habemus opinionem: The New York Times experiments with more structured online comments

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
New pope, new approach to online comments for The New York Times. On Wednesday afternoon, as Catholics celebrated the white smoke, the Times rolled out an experimental approach designed to enhance discussion by adding structured data.
Times readers who went to the paper’s story on the election of Pope Francis were asked them to define themselves three ways: Were they happy with the decision or not? Were they surprised by the choice or not? And are they Catholic or not? (They were not asked to declare alignment as lawful good or chaotic evil.)...
Those framing questions shape the kind of responses the Times could expect; instead of cutting readers loose at the tail end of an article, it’s asking for a specific reaction — and limiting them to 100 words rather than the normal 800 characters. The new system was also accompanied by a slight design change that added a little more breathing room to individual responses and increased the size of the text. And the new comment metadata meant readers can filter comments by perspective — not unlike how Amazon product reviews separate “helpful” reviews into positive and negative varieties.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/habemus-opinionem-the-new-york-times-experiments-with-more-structured-online-comments/

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