Dialogue based Journalism and Business Communication

Dialogue-based Journalism And Business Communication

By Shel Holtz
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-07-10

I reported on the Danish School of Journalism's dialogue-based journalism experiment on FIR, but didn't have time to list some of the results of the effort.

The story appears over at the Online Journalism Review and it holds lessons not only for journalists and publishers, but professional communicators, too.

The class of 22 online journalism students set out to learn firsthand about the impact of online reporting that is open to reader comments. In order to attract a large enough audience to make the experiment worthwhile, the group set up a website dedicated to a local Danish soccer team and populated it with round-the-clock coverage in text, photos, audio, video, and multimedia interactives. "And every story element would be open for comments/dialogue," according to Associate Professor Kristian Strobech, who penned the OJR article.

During the week the site was active, the class recorded 25,000 visits and 400 comments from enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and information-starved fans of the team-fans who, in most cases, knew more about the subject than the students producing the content. The experience produced some intriguing observations:

* With the exception of a single thread that required some intervention, the comments were positive and caused no problems. They included brief notes on editorial content, additional information, identifying errors in reporting, suggestions for coverage and participation in discussions around specific articles and comments.

* Encouraging comments resulted in new leads on stories. In one case, a reader wanted to know what a former team star thought of the team's curent situation. A video team found the former player working as a chef in a restaurant, leading to a story they otherwise would not have pursued.

* Video was most popular with the audience, based on the features that drew the most response. Uploading video clips of games to YouTube made it easy to embed the videos on the site. "We creeated a project account and used tagging to sort all the project videos," Strobech writes. "This allowed the really eager user to subscribe to our channel at YouTube, as well as following the site."

* Live blogging of games was another popular feature-so popular that the constant refreshing of browsers by fans in order to get the latest updates brought the server down during each of the three games covered during the weeklong experiment.

I was particularly intrigued by the live blogging note. The updates simply reported the porgress of the game without commentary or analysis. For those outside of radio or television coverage, it provided the only near-real-time report of the game. Organizations can take a lesson here and consider live blogging on corporate websites of annual meetings, press conferences, and other events as a far less expensive alternative to webcasts-one that seems to resonate with audiences. And if journalists are going to pursue live blogging as a tool of on-the-spot reporting, we should get used to our activities being live-blogged by others.

Organizations can also take a lesson from the idea of opening their content-all of it-to comment and conversation. Any item that appears on a corporate website can allow readers to contribute their own thoughts, which provides feedback to the company and can help identify issues and opportunities, just as feedback led the Danish online journalism students to an interview with a soccer player-turned-chef.

Next up for Strobech is a conference in October that presents the class with "an opportunity for five days of global Web dialogue on subjects such as corruiption in sports, doping, and Olympic copyright."

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About the Author:
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.