fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

If you think of news as a political/social actor, readers become two different types of participants: passive and direct.

If your newspaper is doing a good job, like blogs, it fosters open transparent conversations about any relevant topic. Readers have two choices: to talk at or near each other or to talk with each other.

Readers of The Nevada Sagebrush seem to break the general trend recognized by other student publications. Many of them said their readers are apathetic and comment rarely and many times when they do, conversations degrade into racist remarks, troll battles and other things often experienced by professional papers.

At UNR, the conversations are quite the opposite. We get about 100 responses a week, sometimes less but the conversation stays civil. Rude people are taken care of through self-moderation. The responses are also usually thoughtful and sometimes enhance the topic or hold us accountable in a generally polite way.

But at the same time, the commentors don’t engage one another very often and they rarely leave room for reply in their comments. And as I’ve mentioned, the forums are empty despite us seeding them with conversation topics.

We also print web comments, letters to the editor, have our e-mails on every story and generally stay pretty open and transparent, yet we get little to no direct feedback. Also, we get unsolicited responses but whenever we ask specifically for responses, we get nothing.

So what’s the deal?