For Intro to Civic Media this week we were asked to pick a media news outlet and examine how they incorporated participatory media into their practices and work. Being a regular New York Times reader, I decided to look back at my own personal observations of the NYTimes’ online interaction with readers.
When thinking of examples within the NYTimes website, I kept going back to their blogs, which are managed and written by their staff members and sometimes visitors. The blog comments can be areas for readers to have conversations about the article. I remember that the comments feature started off fairly simple as a stream of messages. Soon they became curated by an editor with a tag indicating that it was recommended by an editor. More recently, instead of being curated by an editor, the newspaper allowed readers to curate by enabling them to “recommend” comments. This resulted in comments being marked not by editors but by the number of recommendations that comment received.
During times of crises such as the earthquake in Japan and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, I’ve seen the newspaper encourage interaction and input from its readers. For example, NYTimes editors may post a call for first hand stories and media. I’ve also seen journalists explicitly search for user-generated media online and incorporate into their article. In the recent confrontation between Occupy Oakland protestors and police, a NYTimes journalists grabbed videos posted by protestors at the scene. The article also grabbed pieces from twitter posts. I found that the inclusion of these user-genereted pieces help to produce an illustrative and detailed account of what had happened.
NYTimes has also created venues for readers to share their own personal stories. In preparation for the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, NYTimes invited readers to respond to the following question: “Where were you on Sept. 11, 2011?”. In addition to sharing words, NYTimes also asked readers to share how they currently feel, from hopeful to angry. Each contributed story created a colored dot on the map – the color indicating how that person feels. What emerged was a tapestry of stories, where anyone could click through and discover people’s 9/11 stories around the world.
Lately, I’ve seen the NYTimes also asks readers to help with data analysis through crowdsourcing. When former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s emails were released, the NYTimes asked readers for help poring through the more than 24,000 emails. With the assistance of readers, NYTimes staff were able to create an interactive timeline of interesting emails for other readers to interact with. The timeline highlights emails from her reaction to a “great speech” by Obama to the failed attempt to bring the Transformers movie to Alaska.
While the NYTimes pulls their readers into their projects through analysis or discussion, the newspaper maintains a conservative relationship with its readers. One problem I had is that they refer to people who contribute time and content as “readers” and not as “colleagues” or “citizen journalists”. This naming continues to highlight the power differential between a mass media outlet like the NYTimes and people who consume and/or willingly give their time and contributions. Additionally, I mostly see the interaction between newspaper editors and readers happening in the blog spaces rather than the rest of the website and perhaps even less so in the printed medium that the NYTimes also comes in. Over the past decade, however, I have noticed the newspaper becoming more interactive with its readership base. It is hard to tell though if that’s a general trajectory that the newspaper wants to continue in or if they are following the trends of the time.