I Towards a Better Inclusivity: Online Comments and Community at News Organizations by Anika Gupta B.S. in Journalism Northwestern University, 2008 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF INSTITUTE MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES MASSACUS iTS 4NOLGY"S ISTITUTE AT THE o TEC MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 72016 JUNE 2016 MAY1 LIBR ARIES @Anika Gupta. All rights reserved. CHVES The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature redacted Signature of Author: Dep rtment of Comparative Media Studies Signature redacted May 6, 2016 Certified by: _ William Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies Thesis Co-Supervisor Certified by: Si nature redacted Matthew Carroll / Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab Thesis Co-Supervisor Certified by: Signature redacted Ian Condry Profe s r of Comparative Media Studies I ) I Thesis Co-Supervisor Accepted by: Signature redacted_ ___ Heather Hendershot Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Comparative Media Studies 2 Towards a Better Inclusivity: Online Comments and Community at News Organizations by Anika Gupta Submitted to the Department of Comparative Media Studies on May 6, 2016 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies ABSTRACT Over the past several years, traditional - or legacy - news organizations have faced enormous challenges as a result of financial pressures and the advent of the participatory internet. This paper traces the znew journalistic contenders, new audience behaviors, and new business models that are emerging in participatory news spaces. This thesis situates the most visible form of online news participation - the comments section - within a broader and evolving debate over how news organizations create relationships with audiences. It draws upon existing literature and history as well as interviews with members of audience engagement and community management teams at news organizations, online comment communities, and comment-based startups. The first chapter of this thesis outlines "The Spectrum of Comments", a visual and text-based explanation of four key dimensions along which comments are organized in different online spaces ranging from social media to the New York Times. This section explores how news organizations balance the competing desire for audience participation with an impulse towards maifntaining editorial control. The second chapter deals with the rise of "engagement," as both a commercial discourse and a new way to envision audience relationships. It begins by tracing the history ofjournalistic relationships to audiences, offering a taxonomy for these relationships based on monological and dialogical modes of conversation, as well as ritual and transmission views of communication. I introduce the term "multi-logical" to capture the asynchronous and multi-voiced communication that occurs in participatory online spaces. Through this theoretical framework, I then examine a few examples of how news organizations operationalize the nebulous term "engagement." The third chapter focuses on how audience engagement teams encounter and cope with abuse - particularly bigotry and harassment - online, and compares moderation work to Hochschild's emotional labor. I find that abuse affects workers across the journalistic enterprise, and that one of the key focus areas for news organizations as they move forward with engagement should be to develop policies and internal guidelines for how to handle some of the risks of engagement. Thesis Committee: William Uricchio Matthew Carroll Ian Condry Professor, CMS Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab Professor, CMS 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I arrived at MIT, I did not believe I could ever produce a >100 page thesis. Several people were instrumental in changing my opinion and making this project possible. I want to thank them personally. Firstly, the extraordinary professors and mentors in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT, especially my thesis committee. To Matt, William and Ian - thank you. You believed in me when I thought this project would never be more than a mess of words and incoherent ramblings. Your careful readings, thoughtful notations and endless patience have turned this project into something slightly more coherent, at the very least. Any remaining errors, obviously, are mine. To everyone I interviewed for this project: thank you for opening your time, your work and your experiences to me. It was an honor and a privilege to learn from such a wide array of people, and I have tried my best to do justice to what you shared with me. To Greg, Andrew and Sydette at the Coral Project - thank you in particular for your insights, your enthusiasm and your comradeship as I asked these questions, and throughout the past year. To my friends and colleagues at CMS: thank you for being the supportive, questioning, unceasingly creative people that you are. Lacey, Lily and Kyrie: if it weren't for those diversions to the mall, our joint obsessing over Doctor Who, or our endless stream of Telegrams, I don't think any of us would have made it through the past two years with nearly this much grace. Finally, to my family: always, and for everything. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction............................................................................Page 5 Literature Review.............................................................Page 18 Research Questions..........................................................Page 22 Interview s.....................................................................Page 23 Chapter One: The State of Comments The Spectrum of Comments.................................................Page 30 Moderator Types.............................................................Page 48 Chapter Two: The Rise of Engagement............................................Page 56 The Old Model - Journalism and Monological Conversation.........Page 59 Dialogical Conversation and the Internet.................................Page 66 Operationalizing Engagement..............................................Page 78 Chapter Three: When Good Threads Go Bad.....................................Page 93 Abusive Comments and Traditional Journalistic Practice...............Page 95 Online Abuse and Emerging Journalistic Practice........................Page 96 Abuse and Social Platforms.................................................Page 105 Moderation Work as Emotional Labor.....................................Page 108 Emotional Labor and Inclusivity...........................................Page 112 C onclusion..............................................................................Page 118 Looking to the Future........................................................Page 120 Research Questions..........................................................Page 124 Future Research...............................................................Page 128 R eferences..............................................................................Page 132 5 INTRODUCTION In July 2015, the online magazine The Verge decided to suspend the comments sections on its online stories. In explaining the decision, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel wrote: "'What we've found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative - a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since" (2015). The Verge was not the only organization to question the purpose and value of the online comments section. Through 2014 and into 2015, several publications decided to either suspend their online comments sections for a while or disband them entirely. These publications included online-only publications like The Verge, technology-focused Re/code and the general interest Daily Beast and Mic; as well as legacy news publishers like PopularScience, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Toronto Star'. When explaining the decision, some editors (like Patel) pointed to negativity in the comments section, and in particular to the problem of abusive or derogatory comments. Others pointed out that commenters represented only a fraction of the news organizations' overall audience (O'Donovan, 2015). And still others wondered if comment boxes, as a medium, were fundamentally flawed. Derek Mead, editor-in- chief of the online magazine Motherboard, expressed that viewpoint when he wrote, "What 1 Most news organizations that have suspended comments have issued statements or explained the decision publicly (sometimes both). The Chicago Sun-Times is an exception. In a September 16, 2015 article, Justin Ellis of Nieman Lab cites the Chicago Sun-Times as having suspended comments. Following the embedded link in Ellis' article, however, leads to a "Page Not Found" error on the Sun-Times website, under a URL that reads "http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/sick- of-web-comments-us-too-heres-what-were-doing-about-it/". Further searching for that URL reveals a reddit discussion titled "Sick of Internet comments? Us too - here's what we're doing about it; Chicago Sun-Times will no longer run comments on articles." Although the link in this reddit discussion leads to the same "Page Not Found", the reddit discussion around the article remains (and includes