News

Friday, October 30, 2009 12:22 PM

Our community guidelines

As anyone who has commented on a Globe and Mail story probably knows, we have a policy on what kinds of comments are appropriate and which ones are removed, but I confess that we haven't always done a great job of communicating that policy clearly and consistently to our readers -- in part because our policy has been evolving, and continues to do so (which I would argue is a good thing).

So why and how are comments on Globe stories taken down? Why doesn't the Globe require commenters to use their real names? Why do some comments simply disappear, while others are replaced by a message that says they weren't "consistent with our guidelines?" Do Globe reporters ever respond to comments, and under what conditions?

These are the kinds of questions that our Community Guidelines FAQ was developed to answer. It also deals with how we approach other forms of community engagement, including live discussions (which we do using software from Toronto's Cover It Live) and forums, which we are in the process of rolling out on our Globe Investor site, and hopefully elsewhere.

In coming up with our policies, we have looked at the way many other media outlets handle comments and community -- including sites such as The Guardian (whose policies are here), the CBC and the New York Times -- as well as non-media communities like Metafilter and Slashdot. Like all of those sites, we want to allow our readers to comment on issues they feel strongly about, but at the same time we want to maintain a civil tone that encourages dialogue instead of partisan attacks.

We are probably never going to achieve that balance completely, or to everyone's satisfaction. But we are trying hard to do so, because we know that many of you look to the Globe as a place where you can discuss important topics, and we want to encourage others to do so.

The FAQ is a work in progress, so please let me know what you think, either by posting a comment here or by reaching me at @mathewi on Twitter or via email at mingram@globeandmail.com.

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Thursday, October 15, 2009 05:54 PM

The story behind a deleted post

In a post written earlier today on our books blog, In Other Words, online books editor Peter Scowen expressed some strong opinions about an internal Globe and Mail workshop we held a few days ago that looked at the issue of "search engine optimization" or SEO. We removed Peter's post, but I want to be clear about why we did that, in part to address some comments that have been made about its disappearance.

There's no question that the impact of search-engine optimization on journalism and media in general is the subject of heated debate -- and even outside the media sphere there is plenty of debate about the topic, as anyone who has read the recent blog posts on it by Danny Sullivan and Derek Powazek can attest. There are no doubt plenty of people both inside and outside the Globe who agree with much of what Peter said in his post.

So why did we remove it? The simple answer is that the Books blog isn't really the place for a debate on the merits of SEO and how it affects the job of Globe editors and headline writers, as Peter himself has acknowledged. We encourage debate about those issues, and SEO is a subject we are all trying to come to grips with, as every other online media entity no doubt is (or should be). But the Books blog wasn't the right forum for that conversation.

I asked Kenny Yum, editor of globeandmail.com, for his thoughts about what happened, and he agreed with what I've described above. He also added this comment:

”It’s important for us to be transparent to you, our readers -- it’s what makes this medium so engaging and new for us. And as newsrooms adapt in an era when we're talking about search engine optimization and other best practices that help us better serve you, we expect and encourage debate about what this means for our craft. The Globe in that way is no different than other newspapers and media outlets. We are striving to be better even if that means that we understand the modern means of distribution and the way readers interact with us. We also invite debate to happen inside and outside the newsroom."

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Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:01 AM

Comments and voting: We need your input

As some of you may have noticed -- and as I wrote in a recent blog post -- we recently launched some new comment and community-related features at the Globe (there are more to come, by the way, along with some improvements that many of you requested, such as the ability to sort comments, see them all on one page, etc.).

Among other things, you can now vote for comments that you agree with, or give the "thumbs down" to comments that you dislike. Unlike the ability to comment or create a user profile, which are available only to registered users, anyone can click and vote on a comment without having to log in. That's what I wanted to talk about.

There was a considerable amount of debate about this feature when we were planning these changes. Some of our team argued that voting -- like commenting itself -- should be restricted to registered users only, while others felt that we should open the voting system up to as broad a group as possible, in order to get a representative view of what readers think. In the end, we decided to leave the voting feature open to anonymous or un-registered users.

There is a downside to that decision, however, and we have started to see some indications of it on some of our political stories, including a recent one about Prime Minister Harper and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff discussing a political arrangement. As several commenters on that story noted, someone (or a group of someones) appears to have hijacked the comment voting system at some point. Although it's not clear whether they were doing it manually or electronically, some comments were getting as many as 300 thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes in a matter of minutes.

One obvious way to prevent this kind of thing -- or at least to make it less likely -- is to change the way the system works, so that only registered users can vote on comments. Other sites such as Digg and Slashdot take this approach. Personally, I would much rather leave the voting feature open, because I think many readers will be irritated by having to log in before they can click a thumbs up or thumbs down button, and because in general I like our site to be as open and inclusive as possible.

The alternative argument is that allowing only registered users to vote would cut down on the kind of hijacking we're starting to see, and would help to improve the quality of the votes and make them more representative of our core users (at least the ones who have registered). In addition, it might create an incentive for people to sign up and get access to all of the other great features that registered users get.

So my question is this: What should we do? Should we leave the voting the way it is, or restrict it to registered users only? You can post a comment here, email me at mingram@globeandmail.com, or send me your thoughts on Twitter at @mathewi.

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Tuesday, May 26, 2009 01:02 PM

Live discussion: New community features

As many of our readers have probably noticed by now, we've made a number of changes to the way we handle comments and other community-related features at the Globe with our redesign and site re-launch. I've discussed some of the changes -- and the improvements that are coming soon -- in an earlier blog post, but I thought I would host a live discussion to see if anyone wants to talk about why we made some of these changes, what the philosophy is behind them, and how we plan to roll out our larger community vision.

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Friday, May 22, 2009 07:56 PM

We've got new community features

Updated:

As many of you have already noticed, we recently launched a fairly major redesign of the Globe's website. Thanks in advance for putting up with some of the bugs and missing pieces -- we are working hard on stamping them out and/or putting the pieces back in place.

When it comes to our story comments, for example, we realize that there are some issues people feel very strongly about (inserting paragraph breaks, sorting the comments by oldest first, improving the navigation, etc.) and we are busy adding those features right now.

We'll be adding some other enhancements as well over the coming days and weeks, including the ability to quote from a comment when you are replying to it, which we think will help you follow the conversation on a story. So please consider this as version 1.0 -- if not a beta -- and rest assured that updates are coming soon.

One of the biggest differences you've probably noticed is that you can now vote on comments, by giving them either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Soon, you will also be able to sort the comments so that you can see which ones got the most positive votes or the most negative votes (you'll be able to sort the comments the old-fashioned way too, in reverse chronological order, or see the newest first).

By encouraging you to vote on comments, we're asking you to help us determine which comments deserve to be highlighted and which deserve to be buried (you can also flag a comment as abusive, of course, as you could under our old system). We want you to play an even more active role in helping us to develop the kind of smart and opinionated -- but also considerate -- community that we think most of you want to take part in.

In addition to voting, we've also added user profile pages (mine is here). This gives you a place where you can tell us -- and other readers -- a little about yourself, and it's also a place were you (and other readers) can see the most recent comments you've made and how many votes they received.

If you enjoy someone's comments, you can go to their profile page and click the "add as friend" button, or post a public message on their profile page. Soon, we hope to be able to give you the ability to rate other readers, by giving them a certain number of stars, and readers whose comments are highly rated and whose profiles are highly rated will eventually be given additional features (such as the ability to upload a photo in place of the generic avatars we have now).

In a nutshell, the idea behind adding these features is to try and turn our comment sections into more of a community of readers -- or rather, to reflect the community that already exists there. Just as behaving in a certain way can enhance your reputation in a real community, we would like your online behaviour at globeandmail.com to contribute to your online reputation. We're hoping that by doing this, we can help improve the "signal-to-noise" ratio of our comments, which many of you have complained about over the years.

Over the next few weeks and months, we will be adding new community features as well, including forums and groups, which will allow you to have a focused discussion around a specific issue, rather than having to do that through comments on a particular news story. In some cases, we may close comments on a story but open a forum where readers can discuss a contentious issue in a more closely moderated environment.

All of these enhancements are designed to make The Globe and Mail's online community a vibrant and active place for discussion -- and even allow the creation of virtual friendships with other Globe readers -- while still maintaining the kind of high standards for debate that we'd like to think most of you associate with the Globe.

As always, if you have any comments or questions, please leave a comment here or email me at mingram@globeandmail.com, or you can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mathewi.

Update:

Just to respond to a few things people have mentioned in the comments: we are going to give you the ability to see all the comments on a single page, so you don't have to go through multiple pages, and we will be fixing the navigation so that you don't go back to the beginning when you vote and you go to the top of the page instead of the bottom if you do go back or forward using the pagination.

We're also going to be adding the ability to quote from another reader's comment when you are replying -- so that other readers will know what you are responding to.

As far as the grey avatars are concerned, one of the things we are considering as an incentive to commenters (to encourage them to provide thoughtful or well-considered comments) is that after receiving a certain number of votes, we might give them the ability to upload a custom photo as their avatar.

To answer at least one complaint, I am also working hard to convince our writers of the benefits of responding to comments, and interacting with readers. I can assure you that we don't see comments as simply a "ghetto that will drive page views." I will say that one of the easiest ways to convince writers that your comments are worth responding to is to say something intelligent (it doesn't necessarily have to be in agreement).

There are many other features we have planned or in the development stages, including the ability (which many of you have mentioned) to "ignore" or hide certain comments or commenters. We're also hoping to have a better mobile version of the site at some point, and to add functions that allow you to comment or vote from your handheld (BlackBerry or iPhone).

And finally, to respond to what seems to be the most common complaint, we are working on bringing back the "mouse over" summary of articles -- please bear with us :-)

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Friday, May 15, 2009 03:29 PM

Tamil protests: Free speech or illegal outrage?

On Sunday night in Toronto, thousands of protesters who had gathered to demonstrate their opposition to the Sri Lankan government's attacks on members of the Tamil minority took over all six lanes of the Gardiner Expressway, the major southern route across the city, and closed it for several hours. Although the demonstrators eventually left peacefully, many Toronto residents complained about the protest, saying they supported the Tamil groups but drew the line at interrupting traffic on a major highway.

Close to 600 commenters posted their thoughts to our story on the protest, many of whom were outraged at what they saw as criminal behaviour by the protesters. Unfortunately, we had to close comments on the story because the volume of offensive and violent comments became too overwhelming for our staff to handle. So I decided to open a live -- and fully-moderated -- discussion on the issue here, using Cover It Live. Feel free to post your comments and thoughts on this issue, but be warned that ad hominem attacks and racist commentary will not be permitted.

Note:  This discussion is now over, but the archived version is still available for those who want to read it.  Thanks to everyone who took part; I apologize if I wasn't able to get to your questions or comments, but there were quite a lot.

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Friday, May 22, 2009 03:02 PM

John Ibbitson's book has a wiki

Globe and Mail journalist and author John Ibbitson has written a new book called "Open & Shut: Why America has Barack Obama and Canada has Stephen Harper," a discussion of Canada and U.S. politics and government that was written in the style of pamphleteer in the early days of American politics — in other words, a stirring argument designed to provoke discussion of an issue. In this case, the issue is whether there is something (or possibly a series of things) that are fundamentally different about Canadian politics when compared to U.S. politics, that make it more likely a leader such as Barack Obama would be elected south of the border.

In order to propel this discussion and debate beyond the pages of his book (which was published May 5 by McLelland & Stewart) the Globe has set up a series of online forums using the Public Policy Wiki as a platform -- the wiki project that we launched earlier this year in partnership with the Dominion Institute, to get input from Canadians on policy issues such as the federal budget, Afghanistan, climate change and immigration. In a similar way, we've created several questions that focus the themes and issues in John's book, and the author selected several notable political observers to kick off the discussions around those questions.

The first topic question is: "Open and Shut argues that the American political system is more open to ideas and to outsiders, while in Canada, cloistered elites protect their power to manipulate Canada's political parties. What, if anything, can and should we do to make party leaders open up their leadership process to the rest of us?" Kicking off that particular topic -- entitled "Open America, Closed Canada" -- is John Duffy, a former advisor to Paul Martin and founder of StrategyCorp. He argues that the federal Liberal Party has deteriorated over the past few years, and says that "the nadir of this long-term deterioration of the leadership selection function was reached when the Liberal crown was awarded last fall de facto, without a Convention, a debate or even a single delegate-selection meeting in a riding."

The second question is: "Federal politicians, and federal public servants, seem increasingly remote and disconnected from the lives of Canadians. Open and Shut maintains that this is because the public service remains closed to outsiders, and because Ottawa has ceded so much power to the provinces. Do we want our federal government to matter more in our lives, and if so, what should we do to give it meaning?" Leading off that discussion -- called "Yes, Mr. President; No, Mr. Prime Minister" -- is David Eaves, a political writer and consultant who is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy and blogs at www.eaves.ca. David argues that what we have in Canada is "a government that resembles a dense fog. Consequently, we shouldn't be surprised Canadians feel disconnected from their government… what is scarier is so do many public servants and politicians. In government information is power; it allows one to shape policy, inform ministers and advance or delay an agenda. Today, too many incentives promote secrecy."

The third question that emerges from Ibbitson's book is "Open and Shut argues that the solution to increasing American protectionism and mistrust over border security is for Canada to propose to the Americans a comprehensive, security, economic and environmental accord that will lead to much greater integration in all three areas. What do you think?" Kicking off this issue is Maryscott "Scotty" Greenwood, who served in the Clinton Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa and is currently Managing Director at McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP, a law and public policy firm based in Washington, D.C. She argues that "Canada should propose a bold new approach to comprehensive cooperation in the areas of security, the economy and the environment. If there is to be a grand new era in Canada-U.S. relations, the ideas will have to emanate from Canada. The U.S. is either unaware of the great benefits that could come from deeper integration with Canada, or is too pre-occupied to take the time to come up with creative solutions to make an already good bi-lateral relationship even better."

Each of these issues comes with its own forum, where readers can debate or post their own questions and responses, and those who are motivated to can create their own forum topics or even edit individual pages with the wiki tools. John will be responding in the forums, and will also be writing a blog within the wiki about the responses and input that come from readers both in the forums and elsewhere. Please stop by and tell us what you think.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 02:44 PM

The benefits of live-blogging a news event

Like a lot of newspapers and media outlets, we at the Globe have been experimenting a lot with a great live-blogging and live-discussion tool called Cover It Live. The software comes from a company located in Toronto, but is being used by everyone from Newsweek and Yahoo to Vanity Fair and the Austin Statesman-Review. We've hosted live discussion/news stories involving the Obama inauguration, the NHL hockey trade deadline, federal communication hearings and even a shooting in a Toronto subway station.

One of the big benefits of the software is that it allows you to do so much within the app itself, which is embedded in a story page as a widget via javascript. You can post photos right in the stream, embed video clips and do instant polls -- and integrated into all that are comments from readers. You can also pull comments from Twitter, either by approving individual users or by pulling in tweets that use a specific hashtag or keyword related to the topic. The editor or "producer" can see all the comments and moderate them, and the live blog can be archived and replayed.

For large public events such as the Obama inauguration (or the Oscars), there is a very powerful desire to interact with other people who are watching the same event, and Cover It Live makes that very easy and appealing.  News updates are interspersed with user comments in a very natural way, and reporters and editors can respond easily. For events such as the NHL trade deadline, several readers asked specific questions of the reporters and columnists who took part, and got answers within minutes -- something that simply doesn't happen with traditional newspaper stories, even online.

Our latest live-blog took place on Tuesday and Wednesday and was designed not so much for discussion, but simply as a place for us to put all of the breaking news that was coming in about swine flu, almost like a news-wire feed. But what happened was quite amazing: it became a discussion about the flu, and not just about whether it was appropriate to be afraid or not, but about its effect on people's lives (wedding trips cancelled, etc.). Questions were asked about the flu and then answered almost as quickly, and knowledgeably -- in many cases, before we could find the answers ourselves. And all through the live-blog, readers thanked us for doing it.

But my favourite part came a couple of hours into the blog, when someone commented that they didn't think much of the swine flu map we were linking to in our news story, which was this map -- a mashup created by infectious disease expert Henry Niman. So the editor moderating the blog (Brodie Fenlon) asked if anyone knew of a better one. Within a minute or two, someone had posted a link to this map, which after a little bit of investigation turned out to be substantially better -- with more recent updates, links to sources of the info, etc. And in a nice bit of symmetry, that map was also "crowd-sourced," in that it was composed of data from multiple contributors.

So here we had a great news-driven package with photos and video (of news conferences), which got more than 5,000 unique readers in about five hours -- and then on top of that we got hundreds of comments from readers, both asking questions and answering each other's questions, and contributing links of value to both our readers and to us. And then to top it all off, several readers thanked us for doing it. How much better could it get?

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Wednesday, April 15, 2009 11:48 AM

The Policy Wiki: A new issue -- climate change

Some of you have probably read, either here or elsewhere, about one of the social-media projects I've been involved with at the Globe, a joint venture with the Dominion Institute known as the Public Policy Wiki. We started the wiki in January, as a way of soliciting input from concerned Canadians about a range of public policy issues -- issues that ordinary Canadians don't typically get to express themselves about. The first issue we launched with was the federal budget. Almost a thousand people signed up in a matter of two weeks, and we got dozens of excellent "briefing note"-style policy proposals submitted, commented on, voted on and promoted in the forums. On the day the budget was released, we took the two most popular proposals and sent them to the Finance Minister in Ottawa.

Our second issue was Afghanistan, and while we got a lot of people reading the prepared analysis and commentary by Major-General Lewis Mackenzie and Janice Gross Stein, as well as the prototype briefing notes submitted by students at the School for Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, we didn't get a lot of submissions from readers concerned about Canada's role in Afghanistan. Why? That's a good question. It could be that we didn't get word out to enough people about the wiki, or that the issue -- while important -- just wasn't urgent enough to compel people to prepare policy proposals related to it, whereas the budget was very top-of-mind for readers.

Undaunted, we are launching our third issue today, one that we know many Canadians feel strongly about: Climate Change. We hope that people who have views about this issue on either side of the fence will come to the Policy Wiki and read the prepared analysis we have from both Dr. David Suzuki -- one of Canada's pre-eminent environmental advocates -- and environmental consultant Ian Morton of the Summerhill Group, as well as an overview from Mark Jaccard of the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and former CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission.

Having read these analysis and overview pieces, readers can check out some of the links to background material, white papers, research documents and Globe and Mail commentary and news stories put together by the Dominion Institute and the tireless researchers at the Globe (thanks, Marjan!). And then they can either vote for the analysis they agree with most, comment on any of the pieces we have prepared, post their thoughts in the forum, or edit an existing briefing note and/or create their own briefing note using the wiki's built-in tools. As we did with the budget, we will pass on the most popular proposals to the federal Environment Minister.

If you are concerned about Canada's role in climate change, and what the federal government is (or isn't) doing about it, please contribute your thoughts through the wiki, and pass on the URL to anyone you think might be interested. If you have any thoughts, please contact me on Twitter (@mathewi) or by email at mingram [at] globeandmail.com.

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Friday, April 10, 2009 12:09 AM

The Globe and Mail: How we use social media

I gave a short presentation at the Podcamp Toronto "unconference" a few days ago about some of the things we're doing here at the Globe and Mail as far as "social media" is concerned, and a number of people asked me if I would be putting the slides up anywhere, so I uploaded them to Slideshare and have embedded the presentation here in this post (or you can go here to see them). They don't include my witty banter, of course, but I may add that later if I get ambitious.

Here's the condensed version of my presentation: I introduced myself as a former reporter, columnist, technology writer and blogger for the Globe who is now the paper's online "communities editor," for lack of a better term. That means I am trying to think of -- and follow through on -- as many different methods of creating, enhancing, fertilizing and connecting with communities of readers around various topics. I went through a few of the ways we are trying to do that, as well as the rationale behind them and what we have learned from them, and then I closed with what we are hoping to do in the future.

The first big experiment was a project called the Public Policy Wiki, which we set up quite quickly and with fairly limited resources (or time), using an off-the-shelf implementation of TikiWiki, which I highly recommend as a very flexible and multi-faceted wiki platform. We deliberately didn't over-design it, because we wanted to make it look different from the Globe -- and wanted it to look sort of experimental as well, which it is. We had quite a lot of success with the first issue we tackled, which was the federal budget, but less so with the second issue (Afghanistan). We are launching a third leg soon on the environment.

One of the other big experiments has been our increasing use of Cover It Live, a live-blogging/discussion tool developed by Keith McSpurren and his team in Toronto. It provides an easy-to-use and administer platform for hosting live-blogs, with a dashboard that allows you to approve individual comments, auto-approve commenters (so their comments flow in automatically), block commenters, send private messages, post audio/video/photos, conduct polls and so on. It is easily embedded in a story page, and it has been a great tool for our coverage of things such as the budget, the CRTC hearings, a subway shooting and the Obama inauguration.

The third thing I focused on is Twitter (where I am @mathewi). We have only a handful of reporters and editors on Twitter, in contrast to somewhere like BusinessWeek, which has 50 or more, but we are gaining steam. I have been promoting the use of Twitter as a way of connecting directly with readers -- not just to promote our content, but to use readers as a resource for stories and our coverage of them. It also humanizes the newspaper and its staff in a way (my friend Duarte put that very well in this message).

As far as lessons go, you can read the slides yourself, but the things I've learned so far are in many cases relatively simple:

-- things like the Policy Wiki don't just draw a huge crowd without some work; there needs to be an obvious incentive of some kind, plus some good old-fashioned promotional effort, and better tie-ins between the wiki and the paper

-- Cover It Live is a great way of making an event into a kind of micro-community, and many people like the immediacy; others (including some within the newsroom) find it noisy and distracting

-- Twitter needs to be personal or it's simply not going to work. And if you let it, it will suck up every spare moment you have  :-)

Let me know what you think, and if you have any thoughts or questions, my contact info is on the last slide. If you like this post, click the little bird that's embedded in the first paragraph and it will add it to Twitter for you.

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