Comment Sections: Awful or Vital for Journalists Going Forward?

Maybe it’s not impor­tant and does­n’t mat­ter, but I want­ed to note upfront that I found Googling my own name an com­fort­ably nar­cis­sis­tic (although prob­a­bly nec­es­sary) exercise.

My Online Reputation

What I found upon search­ing “Matt Zabierek” was, not sur­pris­ing­ly, basi­cal­ly a bunch of my accounts and pro­files on a num­ber of social media and net­work­ing sites. On the sec­ond page of the results, I was able to find links to my sports blog that I oper­at­ed for about three years back in high school as well as a cou­ple of my Dai­ly Cam­pus news stories.

I don’t like being self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry but I think my “dig­i­tal foot­print” is at the very least ade­quate con­sid­er­ing where I stand in my pro­gres­sion as a jour­nal­ist. If a prospec­tive employ­er were to search my name for sam­ples of my past work, I think they’d find a vari­ety of writ­ing approach­es and top­ics that I am pas­sion­ate about.

I think many of my links and past sto­ries from my sports blog and Dai­ly Cam­pus rep­re­sent that I take pride in every­thing I do, whether I’m report­ing on a sto­ry or design­ing my own Word Press blog as a high school kid (with no pri­or knowl­edge and only a “Word Press for Dumb­ies book” as an aid).

Anoth­er advan­tage of the the more than three years worth of writ­ing archives that my blog includes is that any­one who is inter­est­ed can see the improve­ments I’ve made and con­tin­ue to make with my writ­ing from my junior year of high school until now.

Regard­ing social media, over the past cou­ple of years I’ve iron­i­cal­ly tried to large­ly stay away from post­ing on social media just because I’ve found that more times than not it becomes more trou­ble than its worth.

I still use my Twit­ter account to fol­low a ton of news out­lets and media mem­bers whom I respect so that I can keep up with the news, but I’m not post­ing any­thing oth­er than my own work. In a way, it is kind of refresh­ing to just let my work speak for itself with­out hav­ing to deal with a lot of the triv­ial BS. This doesn’t have any­thing with jour­nal­ism, but I also think its allowed me to be more present with every­thing I do, rather than always brain­storm­ing about how I’m going to post or hum­ble brag about every detail of my life.

In a way, as a “jour­nal­ist” my inac­tiv­i­ty has allowed me to sit back and objec­tive­ly observe how oth­er peo­ple oper­ate and inter­act on Inter­net, which has been fas­ci­nat­ing at points along the way.

One tool I’ve found increas­ing­ly use­ful for me as a begin to “sell myself” pro­fes­sion­al­ly has been LinkedIn, which I just signed up for the begin­ning of the school. It’s espe­cial­ly use­ful for jour­nal­ists and writ­ers, because unlike many oth­er pro­fes­sions, we are able to show prospec­tive employ­ers the fin­ished, end-prod­uct of our work by post­ing pub­lished sto­ries to our pro­file. In many ways these pub­li­ca­tions will speak loud­er about our abil­i­ties than any GPA or pri­or posi­tions held. So regard­less of whether you work for the Hart­ford Courant or Dai­ly Cam­pus, you can still impress with the writ­ing and report­ing dis­played in your sto­ries — rather than tell, LinkedIn allows you to show.

Leading the Conversation?

Although I pre­fer to let my work speak for itself when pro­mot­ing on the Inter­net, I’m not naïve and know that jour­nal­ists are in a posi­tion where they now have to con­stant­ly sell them­selves, and that pay­ing employ­ers want us to pro­mote my sto­ries and engage the online read­ers in dis­cus­sion as well.

If the sto­ry that I am pro­mot­ing cov­ers a soci­etal dilem­ma that begs dis­cus­sion, then I have no prob­lem ini­ti­at­ing and encour­ag­ing dis­cus­sion online. How­ev­er, as I’ve writ­ten before, com­ment sec­tions tend to be the most awful thing imag­in­able, regard­less of the sub­ject or con­tents of the sto­ry, espe­cial­ly in the realm sports, where fans (short for fanat­ics) are inher­ent­ly irra­tional about their alle­giances and impos­si­ble to have any rea­son­able dis­cus­sion with.

I lit­er­al­ly have yet to see a com­ment beneath a sports col­umn that reads, “Hey, this was well-writ­ten, but I dis­agree with a cou­ple of your points and here’s why.”

It’s almost always a mix of vile and peo­ple jump­ing out to make the same lame jokes 97 oth­er peo­ple have already made on Twitter.

There’s a rea­son why major online web­sites such as Grant­land have com­plete­ly ditched com­ment sec­tions. (Although I do think the New York Times and oth­er news out­lets might be onto to some­thing by allow­ing read­ers to sort the com­ments by “read­ers’ picks,” so that they can cut through all the crap. If you’re going to have a com­ment sec­tion, that’s prob­a­bly the way to do it.)

So to answer the ques­tion of whether I’m com­fort­able lead­ing con­ver­sa­tion on the Inter­net as a jour­nal­ist, I think it entire­ly depends on the nature of the content.

If it’s a col­umn I wrote explain­ing why one sports team has been strug­gling recent­ly, and a bunch of fans of that team want to tell me I suck, then I’ll pass.

But if I’m writ­ing about why men­tal ill­ness­es car­ry less stig­ma today than in the past for exam­ple, then yes, I think read­er feed­back and engage­ment is cru­cial to con­tin­ue the dis­course, dis­cuss top­ics that we wouldn’t oth­er­wise, and inspire pos­i­tive change. That is at least in part jour­nal­ists func­tion in soci­ety and we need to uti­lize every pos­si­ble dig­i­tal tool to do so going forward.