For more engagement and trust, try this one weird trick

I recently joined the board of Honolulu Civil Beat, and one of the things I’ve always loved is reading their (heavily moderated) comments. The comments can be just as engaging as the pieces themselves. They demonstrate varied perspectives, deep knowledge, and vigorous but respectful debate from readers.

This is in large part because a team of humans takes time to vet those comments. Over on the social platforms, shows of intelligence and respect are lacking. We’ve seen many real-life damages to compassion, trust, and democracy thanks to the murky and ever-changing algorithms created by people who let bullies and bad actors use their space.

Everyone should be able to name mistakes they’ve made in their career. Here’s one of mine: In the early 2010s at CNN Digital, moderating comments at a brand of that size and scale became an impossible nightmare. The team was struggling to hold back the tide of lies and hate, right there on our own platform, and the trolls always found a way around the filters. Meanwhile, social media was ascendant. The platforms had invested in technology and developers to create engaging (“addictive” was a word used positively at the time) experiences in ways CNN and every other news organization hadn’t done.

So we made the decision to kill those hateful, uncool, and outdated comments on CNN’s platforms, and “go where the audiences are.” This effectively ceded the direct relationship we had with our audiences to the social platforms. In a few more years those platforms, a.k.a. our “partners,” would repeatedly demonstrate a lack of interest in standing up for health, safety, and truth.

News organizations can be very good at output — publishing a story, sending a newsletter, broadcasting a show or audio, and pushing out posts. But how good are we at the intake? How are we at listening, engaging, and facilitating connections with and among our audiences about the journalism we are supposedly doing for them?

So many news organizations are grappling with how to stop the decline in trust and engagement. So many news executives want their brands to become truly “essential.” The act of listening, reflecting, and sharing what audiences are saying is a powerful and under-utilized tool.

That isn’t just about making comments great again. It’s about all the ways newsrooms can better own true interaction on their own turf. That includes:

• Person-to-person interactions and events. This doesn’t have to be a costly event with canapés, but can simply be going into the community on a regular basis. The pop-up newsrooms Civil Beat holds regularly across Hawai’i see a steady stream of current and future readers, many bringing story ideas, complaints, or who simply want to meet some of the team.
• Digital events and seminars, with or without live video, where people who want to engage in the conversation can do so and be heard.
• Asking audiences to share questions or thoughts on a topic. The Covid Q&A at CNN was active for two years and drew millions of users and off-the-charts engagement metrics. It was fueled by audience questions that were emailed into the newsroom via a simple form. CNN also did some voicemail projects that were amazing — literally listening to our audiences!
• Innovative uses of technology like the interactions via text that David Cohn and team are driving over at Subtext.
• Looking outside of news for inspiration. Think about where you find healthy and helpful engagement. I hear that the curated comments in the NYT Cooking app have saved many recipes from disaster or blandness.

Most news organizations have done some version of those things and more. But very few do it frequently and regularly. This is work that can be done using everyday tech and tools, like email, eyes, and ears.

Are there ways to use AI in the process? Probably. But I’d place the job of connecting humans with the humans.

As someone who started out helping put The New York Times on the internet — my first regular paycheck in the mid ’90s was from wonderfully named “New York Times Electronic Media Company” — I am still an early web person at heart who believes in the power of the internet to bridge divides, not to widen them until the seams of democracy are straining.

The best use of the internet is not to be a place to push out content, walk away, and leave interaction to the ethics-free giants of social media, but to enable true interaction with the people the work of journalism is for.

The social platforms broke the trust and hope that was, in painful hindsight, naively placed in them. 2024 is the year for news organizations to prioritize and own consistent and true engagement. The ability, and the mandate to do so, exists right now.