(Rich Gordon)

The open-ended comment box, the standard approach for online conversation around news, is no longer the only option. In my last post, "New approaches to news conversations: the time is right," I argued that local media have an exciting opportunity to build deeper audience engagement - especially with young adults - by taking advantage of new Web technologies.

To get a sense of what's now possible, check out News Mixer, a demonstration Web site launched last month by an innovation class that I co-directed (with my colleague Jeremy Gilbert) in the master's program at the Medill School. The site was developed in collaboration with Gazette Communications, which owns the newspaper and ABC television affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The New Media Publishing Project class set out to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. News Mixer addresses these challenges by melding three "commenting structures" - question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor - into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system.

To test out the site, log in with your Facebook ID. You can also get an overview of how the site works via a six-minute screencast that the students prepared. For an in-depth look at how the site was developed - and recommendations for journalists, media companies and journalism schools - download the class's 79-page (PDF) final report.




Here are the key features of News Mixer:

Facebook Connect: This service, launched by Facebook, in December, allows News Mixer users to log in with their Facebook ID instead of establishing a new login and password for the site. Beyond the convenience of this approach, Facebook Connect also allows the site to display comments from your social network, meaning that every user has a different - and personalized - experience. We hope this will stimulate more intelligent discussion than generally occurs via the open-ended comment box that appears at the end of articles on most news sites. Also, every time you post to News Mixer, you are given the option of cross-posting that comment to your Facebook feed, which exposes it to friends not using News Mixer and potentially draws them to participate as well.

Three options to comment: The class decided to offer three very different options for reader response:

• Questions and Answers: Displayed like annotations in the margin of an article, readers can ask a question about any paragraph of the article - or answer questions left behind by other people.


• Quips: Displayed as a small talk-bubble in a live feed on the home page and on article pages, quips are short-form comments that allow people to leave feedback in a quick, to-the-point form. They're modeled after Twitter and instant-messaging.


• Letters to the Editor: A very old idea, but with a few new twists. News Mixer calls on letter writers to "Add your voice to the marketplace of ideas. Offer a thoughtful point of view in 250 words or less." Once written, letters are treated equivalently to articles in News Mixer. Each letter gets its own page, and people are allowed to write letters in response. When a letter is particularly insightful, an editor can use the News Mixer content management system to designate it as an "editor highlight." The "editor highlight" letters are given prominence on the main Letters to the Editor page, and also appear on the home page, intermingled with news articles. The idea is to encourage and reward the most thoughtful responses.

User profiles: All users of News Mixer get their own profile page. On News Mixer, you can follow others' activity on the site, and view the activity in your personal news feed. Along with your own contributions, recent comments from your Facebook friends and people you're following on News Mixer are aggregated in your user profile.

A personalized home page: The News Mixer home page highlights recent comments and "quips" from your social network. It also highlights a question that has recently generated a lot of activity.

News Mixer has gotten quite a bit of positive feedback already. Patrick Beeson, a content manager for E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group, wrote that News Mixer "could be a game-changing effort for news story comments." Blogger Nick Gehring wrote that News Mixer "takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto." And Read/Write Web, a widely followed blog focusing on Web technologies, published a lengthy assessment of News Mixer that concluded:

We would encourage others in the industry to borrow some of News Mixer's ideas as well. It's not too late to save the daily paper - it just takes some fresh ideas. Like Rupert Murdoch recently said, the time for doom and gloom is over - the internet is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. We agree. Now is the time for innovation because... well, it's either innovate or die. Hopefully most will choose the former.

Gazette Communications is one company that seems to agree with the need to innovate. Led by CEO Chuck Peters, the company is leading the way in rethinking how a local media company should operate in the digital age. The company plans to use the software that powers News Mixer to launch a site for eastern Iowa in 2009.

Others are also welcome to use the software, which has been released on an open-source basis.

News Mixer was created by six Medill master's degree students: Andrea Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, Kayla Webley and "programmer-journalists" Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark.

Boyer and Mark, who had careers in computer programming before coming to Medill, enrolled at the school through a scholarship program funded by the Knight News Challenge. (We still have several more scholarships available to programmer-developers interested in a fully funded journalism master's degree and an opportunity to participate in a future innovation class similar to the one that spawned News Mixer.)

The class developed News Mixer in response to a challenge from their instructors. We asked the class to find a better way of encouraging news-based conversations than the open-ended comment boxes typical on most news sites. While commenting does build Web site usage and loyalty, comment threads too often become platforms for ranting, hostility and racism rather than constructive dialogue and debate.

Part of the problem is that news organizations have been unwilling to invest in better technology and to allocate staff time to cultivating and facilitating the discussion.

But as I wrote in my last post, "there have been some other, more fundamental problems: The core online audience wasn't the core audience for news, Web pages were cumbersome software interfaces, and the anonymity of the Web often led to incivility. These problems made it very difficult to form a genuine 'online community' based on news conversation."

News Mixer takes advantage of five forces that are driving the evolution of online user interactivity:

• The "digital natives" are coming of age.


• The time and costs required for Web development have plummeted.


• Advances in Web technology now enable rich interactive experiences that weren't possible with simple HTML pages.


• Online social networks are fundamentally changing how we meet people, stay in touch with those we know, and discover interesting content.


• Our digital identities - and social networks - are becoming portable.

I'm quite proud of the work our students produced. As I've written elsewhere, I think the class can be a model for innovation in the media industry through partnerships involving philanthropy, higher education and industry. The students and I would love to get your feedback via the comment thread below or the News Mixer feedback form.


By Rich Gordon (richgor-at-northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.