Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Privacy vs. Participation for News Releases
When it comes to news releases, the cat is out of the bag. News releases have been visible by the public for at least 18 years, but an entirely new level of transparency is emerging with social media.
We’ve been communicating with our clients about providing social media commenting on news releases, and we are now expanding the conversation to include others. We want to hear your ideas about the concept of commenting on news releases.
Most clients, the institutions who contribute their news releases to Newswise, are excited about this new opportunity, and they anticipate the positive effects of commenting by users. User participation is a basic component of social media; it builds community, enhances the story and adds to the natural history of news.
Clients have consistently raised the issue of wanting to control the comments. They want to:
1- be allowed to opt out of commenting,
2- be allowed to delete certain comments, and
3- be notified of comments.
Some public relations professionals express fears, but this primarily involves issue of governance or moderation of comments. Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus addresses this issue: Governance is a set of principles and goals that have been internalized by the participants and “helps us behave according to our better natures”. He suggests “ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group.”
For example, clients fear that comments will be outrageous or off the wall, and that these comments would harm the effectiveness of a news release. If you participate in many online forums, you will encounter some comments that are almost abusive. There are many forms of abuse, including trolls. “In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community … with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”
Another example of abuse was exposed in a recent investigation the Center for Media and Democracy, which found that “Digg Patriots” shut out certain content on Digg with their controlled, collaborative (read conspiracy) commenting and voting.
We have faith in our community, content, and principles of governance. Commenting is one of the basic principles of social media and a trend that is happening. There is a profound positive discussion, which is much more empowering. We will experiment and monitor the participation of our community. For example, we will test the concept of whether login is necessary or desirable for civil conversation.
To a certain extent, the fear of social media and commenting in particular might be related to the fears about privacy. In the past, news releases were written for a select audience, i.e. journalists. The fear of commenting in particular is associated with this fear of losing privacy and losing control associated with the perception of privacy.
Social media is also based on a self- or community-regulating effect. It is clear that some forums are better than others, and we will be trying to create a culture of responsible, professional, collegial, and collaborative commenting. We plan to introduce commenting in a beta version and work to develop a civil atmosphere. We believe that the culture will be a reflection of our community of journalists, PR professionals, and knowledge-worker users.
Clients will be able to choose not to allow commenting on their news releases and to delete objectionable (within guidelines) comments our staff does not catch. Notification of comments is not automatically available in this first beta version, and we will be using a manual notification system.
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