The politics of participation in news commenting, presented at IAMCR 2014, Hyderabad. Fiona Martin's Mediating the Conversation study identifies where news media are opening articles for comment, how social analytics are driving investment in user commenting platforms and which types of companies figure in the growth of the news mediation industry.

2. Mediating the Conversation
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik
The politics of participation:
online journalism and the
nature of commenting
work in news and
opinion
sites.

3. 3 year study of the politics and governance of
public commenting on online news media in
Australia, US, UK and Denmark
Aims:
-gauge scale, scope, and forms of ‘conversation’
on online news
- map the news mediation industry and work of
comment facilitation and moderation
-identify the technologies, practices and policies
that might help journalists mediate more
inclusive, civil, productive exchanges online
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik

4. What makes conversation democratic is not
free, equal and spontaneous expression, but
equal access to the floor, equal participation in
setting the ground rules for discussion, and a
set of ground rules designed to encourage
pertinent speaking, attentive listening,
appropriate simplifications, and widely
apportioned speaking rights.
(Michael Schudson, 1997: 307)
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik

5. Methodology:
Critical network study of dialogic participation
(Lovink, Fuchs, Carpentier).
Where, when and how can people comment on
news media?
Who controls and mediates this participation?
What is the work of facilitating and moderating
comments?
Who speaks and how is it ‘conversation’?
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik

6. Analysing dialogic participation – after
Carpentier (2011)
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik

7. Title In-house news
comments
platform mode Social media
Comments
Daily Mail yes Bespoke Open by default yes
Guardian yes Bespoke Selected yes
BBC no Bespoke On opinion only yes
Telegraph yes Disqus Selected yes
Sky News yes Livefyre Selected yes
news.com.au no yes
ninemsn no yes
Yahoo 7 no yes
SMH/Age yes Disqus Selected yes
ABC no On opinion only yes
Huffington Post yes Selected yes
CNN yes Disqus Selected yes
New York Times yes Bespoke Selected yes
Fox News yes Livefyre Selected yes
NBC yes Open by default yes
Ekstra Bladet yes Bespoke Selected yes
B.T. no yes
Politiken no On opinion only yes
TV2 no yes
Danmarks Radio no On opinion only yes
Which news sites are open for in-house comment?

8. Which news sites are open for in-house comment?
• Examined top 5 most accessed mainstream online news sites
in UK, US, Aust. DK (n = 20)
• Mix of broadcast, newspaper and digital native, commercial
and public service
• 55% open for in house comment on news articles (less than
WAN-IFRA 2013 newspaper study)
• All US sites, majority UK sites, 1 Australian, 1 Danish.
• Newspapers dominate in offering news commenting
• Broadcasters less likely to offer commenting access
• Public broadcasters (ABC, BBC) prefer in-house comments on
op-ed articles only, as do Danish publications (Politiken debat
and DR)
• All push comments out to social media

9. comment mediation eco-system

11. Facebook’s Open APIs have established
conditions for online sharing and participating
that undermine privacy, data security,
transparency, and user autonomy.
Robert Bodle, 2011

12. NEXT STEPS:
Digital inclusion analysis of the commenting
interfaces
Data analysis of commenting to determine
scale and scope of participation and dialogic
interaction
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik

13. References:
Bodle, R 2011 Regimes of sharing: Open APIs, interoperability, and Facebook.
Information, Communication & Society 14 (3). 320-337
Carpentier, N. (2011). The concept of participation. If they have access and
interact, do they really participate? CM: Communication Management
Quarterly/Casopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem, 21:13-36.
O’Donovan, C. 2014. Why The New York Times and The Washington Post (and
Mozilla) are building an audience engagement platform together. Nieman
Journalism Lab. June 19th
2014. http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/why-the-
new-york-times-and-the-washington-post-and-mozilla-are-building-an-audience-
engagement-platform-together/
Schudson, M. 1997. Why Conversation is not the Soul of Democracy. Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 14 (4): 297-301
World Editors Forum (2013) Online comment moderation: emerging best
practices. World Association of Newspapers WAN-IFRA and Open Society
Foundation. http://www.wan-ifra.org/reports/2013/10/04/online-comment-
moderation-emerging-best-practices
fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au
@media_republik