Last semester the J-840 class organized a credibility roundtable under the guidance of Professor Peggy Kuhr. The following is a brief recap from a report written by the 13 students in the class.
The client was the Lawrence Journal-World Web site. The study involved conversations with members of the Lawrence Community during an evening roundtable. The goal was to determine if user-posted comments on http://ljworld.com affected the credibility of the World organization.
Two members of the J-840 class served as moderators and the roundtable was videotapes by yours truly. Ten participants attended the roundtable. The conversations were limited to several participants most eager and vocal to talk. The journalism class established three research questions:
1. Do user posted comments affect the credibility of the World Company?
2. Do user-posted comments affect the credibility of individual Lawrence Journal World news and feature stories?
3. If so, how is credibility affected?
The roundtable lasted approximately two hours. Participants were not paid. Participants were advised of KU's human research guidelines. John, let me know if you would like the class to view a portion of the videotape? Here is a copy of the rest of the study:
Limitations:
Like all research techniques, roundtable discussions have certain limitations. First, only ten participants attended the roundtable discussion. This small participant pool is not representative of the thousands of visitors the ljworld.com Web site has every year. This problem was mostly a result of timing; the project did not get under way until late in the semester, and there was not enough time to properly plan and execute an effective recruitment strategy. Also, we did not realize when we scheduled the event that it coincided with a KU basketball game, which may have kept some potential participants from attending.
Our sample was further compromised by the fact that, while most of the participants were articulate and eager to talk, a few (mostly women) were reticent and seemed to defer to the more vocal attendees. One male participant left after the first hour, and two others arrived late, including one man who left after ten minutes without contributing.
Participants:
Hotvedt, Paul: age unknown, no information on reading or commenting on ljworld site
King, Tom: age 50-57, frequent reader of comments, infrequent commenter
Krambeer, Teresa: age 42-49, neither a reader nor a commenter
Lynn, Marion: age 50-57, frequent reader and commenter
Rodríguez, Robert: age 26-33, infrequent reader and commenter
Slappy, Zsashamica: age 26-33, infrequent reader, never comments
Snyder, Laura: age 18-25, infrequent reader and commenter
Thies, Galen: age 34-41, frequent reader, infrequent commenter
Welch, Charla: age 18-25, frequent reader, no information on commenting
Wendt, Bill: age unknown, frequent reader and commenter
The Roundtable Discussion:
Why people post comments. Several themes emerged when we asked participants to address their feelings about online user comments at the LJW site. We discussed why participants chose to post comments on the Web site, or chose not to do so. The reasons offered included: readers liked the opportunity to express themselves; they enjoyed practicing their writing skills; and they felt strongly about certain issues. Two participants said their story comments were usually politically motivated:
Snyder: I would say, for me, anything politically oriented, because as I mentioned earlier, my opinion tends to be the minority and I like to have a say, too. I like to see both sides of it presented …
Wendt: It’s a way of expressing … there’s a lot of control of the media these days, and a lot of control of how people think … The blogs [comments] are a way for me to express, “Hey, this is just crazy, this is just insane,” and to fight back.
Why people read comments. To some degree, participants viewed the comments as more a form of entertainment than news. King mentioned that some forums tend to develop a “Jerry Springer” tone. Thies said he enjoyed this aspect of the forums, and would often “read all the way through just to see how people will go at each other.”
Credibility of comments and commenters. Participants agreed that the comments and commenters were not universally credible:
Krambeer: I think it depends on the topic because some people get real emotionally charged and they’re really passionate about a subject and so they can’t be objective about their comments… So I don’t know if you can really call it credible because what I would write would be what I would think, what I would feel, but that doesn’t mean that anybody else would think that way.
King: I don’t think you can say the comments section on the whole is credible or incredible. They are composed of distinct segments and parts. Some are more credible than others.
But the lively and sometimes controversial nature of the comments seemed to have little impact on the participants’ view of the World Company as a whole:
Krambeer: If it got too out of hand, I might not read them, you know if it was continually the Jerry Springer thing, I would cease to read them. I would probably still continue reading the newspaper, maybe even reading the stories online. …I don’t think it would discredit the organization if I didn’t like the comments.
One reason that the user comments did not hurt the paper’s credibility with participants was that they perceived the Web site as being administered well. Thies mentioned the “Reader Reaction” section (a now-discontinued message board on ljworld.com) as being an example of poor administration, but indicated that did not seem to be the case with the current comments feature. Lynn, who said he was administrator of the River City Talk site, said there were some local Web surfers who “go around ruining forums,” but that they generally stayed off ljworld.com because they knew they would be removed. Wendt said that, though he believed the World Company’s editorial stance to be conservative, he had never experienced or heard about any censorship of left-leaning comments on the site.
Participants generally agreed that the registration requirement was an important instrument in maintaining the credibility of the comments feature. However, Slappy said registration was an obstacle that made it less likely she would post a comment.
Anonymous comments. Participants also discussed the merits of online anonymity:
King: I think you should have to do your real name. If you have an opinion, you should stick by it. … You should be responsible for your opinion.
Thies: I agree to a certain extent, but I think sometimes those online forums are used as places to explore your own opinions, to experiment with them. And maybe throw some things out there that you wouldn’t say in person … “I’m trying to establish in my mind what my opinion is on this. What about this view, what about this take on it?” And it’s something that I might not want to throw out there if it was my real name on it…
Thies went on to say that anonymity allows commenters to write without leaving a “digital footprint” that could come back to haunt them later, and that it allows readers to focus on the content of a post rather than the personality of the commenter. The group did not reach consensus on this issue.
Reporter participation in comments. A debate over the role of the reporter arose when Robert Rodriguez mentioned a recent Journal-World article about Latino immigrants in Lawrence. Rodriguez perceived a bias on the part of the reporter, because he said the article gave the impression that all Latino immigrants were menial laborers. Lynn recalled that this article had been the subject of extensive and rather contentious reader comment, and that he had joined the fray himself. The moderator asked whether, in the case of a controversial article such as this, it would be valuable for the reporter to address complaints from readers in the story comments section online. Rodriguez answered yes:
Rodriguez: It would be nice to be able to ask the reporter these questions directly. Like well, why didn’t you interview any professionals? Why did you only focus on this subset of the population? It’d be interesting to get those answers because maybe there were legitimate reasons why it was done or maybe it was done and not included in the article for space, or … I don’t know. I think almost all articles now have, if you want to e-mail the reporter, you can send a comment or ask a question to the reporter directly. And I’ve done that before, too … But it’s one thing to ask a person directly and privately, or semi-privately, since this is an email, and another thing to bring it out in a public forum and then see if there’s some response.
Some participants defended the article to some degree, and expressed discomfort with the idea of reporters being asked to explain their stories in the comments section:
Thies: If it’s a sin of omission, that’s especially hard to defend. Because I mean, I can’t write a 10,000-word article on every single topic. To a certain extent I have to say, this is the focus of the article. And then people are always going to say, you forgot about this, you forgot about this … It would be very difficult for someone to defend themselves for sins of omission on stories ... There’s just no way to cover that in a format that you can cover in a newspaper every day. …
Snyder and King said in most cases it would be unfair to demand that reporters comment on their own stories.
Usefulness of comments. One important concern for any news organization is whether the presence of negative or critical comments in response to a story might compromise the organization’s credibility with those who read them.
Snyder said reading the comments sometimes made her think, “Hey, the journalist didn’t get all sides of the story.” But participants generally agreed that the presence of comments did nothing to damage the site’s credibility, and if anything, enhanced it. Welch said the inclusion of comments had the potential to provide readers with a fuller understanding of a story. Thies said that the most important reason for a news site to provide a comments feature was that it provided “accountability.”
Thies: I think that a journalist is going to come to a story with a certain worldview, and the facts of the story are perceived through that lens. And I think that the comments a lot of times that are made on a story, basically just can take those facts and show it through a different lens—“Here's how it looks through my lens.” And in that respect I think it can add to the credibility of the story.
He added that comments were more effective vehicles for reader response than letters to the editor, because there were no space limitations.
Some suggested that the comments may benefit the news organization as well:
King: I think if the comments relate to a story and are well-presented, I’m certain that editors look them over. And it’s a good gauge for an editor to see what the public is thinking. At least it’s one way of getting an impression of public thought and what the public will and won’t tolerate. So I think they can be useful in that sense.
Lynn said reader forums were an important aspect of the online world:
Lynn: The Internet has changed our entire world in ways that we don’t even comprehend, and there’s a whole bunch of “netties” in this room. … We’ve got people who – they were never taught to communicate in conventional ways. For example, they never learned it; they never found a way. Now they’ve got an outlet. The media also has something entirely new, and that is immediate and broad-based response to anything it says. Where it’s going to go with that, I don’t know. I don’t think the media does either. This is all new, and two weeks from now it’s going to be different. … I’m not sure you can say well, we ought to have comments for this reason. I think you ought to have comments because you ought to have comments. I don’t know what all the ramifications are.
King agreed, saying the comments section was valuable in and of itself regardless of the credibility of individual commenters:
King: Its purpose and its truth lies in the fact that they are there, because these people do have the chance to express an opinion…
Conclusions
Participants attending the roundtable agreed that the presence of comments on ljworld.com didn’t compromise the credibility of the organization. They recognized and appreciated the distinction between user comments and the articles themselves. They thought the World Company had a well-moderated newspaper Web site. There were certain topics where the organization’s credibility was seen as suspect by some participants – Rodriguez, as noted above, said that some coverage of the immigration issue in the paper was biased, and Wendt said the paper overplayed the evolution issue – but all agreed that the comments section provided a valuable forum for dissent. The exit survey, filled out by seven of the participants, confirmed this conclusion. Asked whether they believed inclusion of story comments on the Web site was a good idea, each of the seven respondents marked, “Yes.”
Recommendations
In retrospect, class members thought that we had an ideal number of participants for an intimate, comfortable discussion; but we would have preferred holding a series of small, similar discussions (had time permitted) in order to hear from a broader spectrum of the public. Additionally, since several of the participants who neither read nor posted comments were not as vocal as those who did, recruitment strategies should focus on securing participants who have more than a cursory knowledge of the topic. This might lead to a conversation that involves all members of the roundtable.
Despite these shortcomings, this particular credibility roundtable establishes a foundation for future research in this area, and we would suggest that additional research be conducted using a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. It might be useful, for example, to conduct a more tightly focused study on the particular impact of including comments on the same page as articles, as opposed to “hiding” them in a link, as some other sites do.
The Authors
This study was conceived and conducted by students in Professor Peggy Kuhr’s Journalism 840 graduate seminar in the fall of 2005.
Jennifer Byrd: Recruitment; Video/audio recording; phone/email tree
Dan Blom: Developed questions
Lisa Coble: Recruitment; co-wrote and coordinated ad; took notes during roundtable; wrote news release
Kristy Croom: Recruitment; food and drink; greeting; room set-up; co-wrote ad; co-wrote draft of report.
George Diepenbrock: Developed questions; recruitment
Vincent Edwards: Moderator; phone/email tree
Heidi Fedak: Recruitment; co-wrote ad; developed questions; took notes; co-wrote news release; wrote participant welcome letter; wrote follow-up story for the journalism school’s newsletter
Stefanie Graves: Recruitment; food and drink; greeting; room set-up; exit survey; draft of report
Stuart Lebow: Video/audio recording and editing
Deron Lee: Note-taker; coordinated and organized final report
Staci Martin-Wolfe: Moderator; recruitment; coordinated ad.
Anton Menning: Room reservation; recruitment; room set-up
Elizabeth Trotta: Food and drink; greeting; room set-up; note-taking; thank-you notes
