Newspapers and Discussion Boards
Online Communities or Social Networks?

by Glenn Scott and Cassandra Imfeld

Preliminary Conclusions

Our overarching quest in this presentation – as in our course – has been to determine the extent of virtual community-building occurring on newspaper online news sites. Interactivity, of course, has been one of the heralded benefits of journalism as practiced on new media. Our aim is to understand the costs and rewards of interactive features.
Although our analysis continues, we can identify some preliminary observations:

1. By nature of the type of site – a gathering place for those interested in the implications of news and public affairs – those who take part in interactive forums tend to be more motivated by ideas and knowledge sharing than by motives to form close associations. These are communities built around the free exercise of speech, not always around affinities. Thus, online networks are characterized by exceedingly weak ties and by frequent contestations among participants. Social capital can be reaped in several ways: knowledge acquisition, identity formation, and status conferral (reputation-building), even among relative strangers.

2. Participants occasionally do seek the rewards of communion. Most notably, a sense of fellowship can occur through reinforcement of identities, as in some of the less contentious conversations in the Honolulu Advertiser dedicated to the mutual construction of “local-ness.” Communion also appears to occur at ideological levels on sites of e-the-people, where posters gladly embrace the comments of politically and intellectually like-minded participants. Even there, however, communion is expressed abstractly more than in personal terms.

3. Preece’s important element of usability is greatly dependent upon the quality of the software programs that news sites run. We have so far seen no examples of programs highly customized for a certain site. Most news organizations appear to buy programs from vendors and to employ them with little variation. Some programs are clearly easier to navigate than others.

4. In addition to choice of software is the alternate choice of contractor. Some sites – those using e-the-people, for instance – chose to associate themselves with quite a high-minded interactive program with specific aims for community building. By doing so, however, those papers sacrificed the opportunity to promote discussions about their own regional issues. Thus, in their trade-off, they sought outside administration of a sophisticated tool at the cost of limiting their abilities to engender community input and, for that matter, to capture local advertising markets.

5. As for sociability, software also matters, as the USA Today’s clunky discussion boards more than aptly illustrate. But more elements feed into the outcome of sociability. As Rheingold, Preece, and Outing, have suggested, sites with clear statements of mission and with some kind of moderating presence appear more capable of maintaining community discussions that more directly relate to the news itself.

6. Users make a difference, too. We find that a few skillful or simply community-minded participants can indeed help to set norms for higher levels of sociability. They can, at times, even overcome the apparent lack of attention of some site administrators.

7. Online news forums appear to have little connections to the actual newsgathering practices of the newspapers. Posters often complain, in fact, that the journalists connected with the site should pay more attention to their comments. We saw no examples of self-identified journalists taking part in discussions at their papers’ sites. This suggests that newspapers do not readily identify such sites as resources that might advance their missions. Thus, it might be that participants are reaping social capital while the news organizations themselves are generally missing out.

We hope to address this last issue more in later stages of this research with follow-up surveys of editors and journalists at some of the sites we are analyzing.

We can say, then, that a particular kind of community-building is beginning to take shape at online news sites. This horizontal, loosely knit kind of community seems to carry characteristics unique to news sites. The community is one of ideas and identities expressed in often unfettered terms.

We suspect newspapers and their online editors/administrators could do more to bolster these communities. For now, the labor and programming costs of such increased attention may seem too risky for the potential rewards. We will continue to look into these issues.

Last updated 11/25/02

©2002