2017 will be the year news comments finally start pulling their weight.
The recent wave of news sites nixing comments illustrates the complicated relationship most organizations have with comment sections. By turning comments off, publishers deliberately turn away the same “active users” that make social platforms like Facebook so valuable to advertisers.
And it’s no surprise, given the terrible choice publishers face in managing their comments. Either commit significant resources to heavy-handed round-the-clock police work, or stand back and watch the space below articles become a festering hellhole of harassment, spam, and abuse. Few organizations have the bandwidth to figure out how to get people to improve their behavior online.
But audiences are hungry for trusted news and debate outside the walled gardens of the big echo-chamber platforms, and advertisers are increasingly anxious about feeding Facebook’s monopoly on customer access and attention. Media organizations are the natural and traditional bridge between the two, despite the chaos brought on by the sudden migration to digital.
When you figure out how to improve comment sections without taking resources away from the newsroom, new opportunities open up. In the next year, armed with a new set of behavior-modifying platform tools, publishers will finally turn their comment sections into valuable assets, into the foundation of their response to Facebook’s incursions. Peel back the layers of abuse, and you’re left with an incredible combination: trusted, high-quality news content combined with real, active social networks, on the same page, under the same roof.
By this time next year, we’ll be wondering how news sites ever survived without comments.
Aja Bogdanoff is cofounder and CEO at Civil, makers of Civil Comments.
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
David Weigel A test for online speech
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news