Journalist Comments at The Guardian

Day three at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with a presentation by Scott Wright, whose focus is on how journalists at The Guardian comment below the line on their own online stories. There’s been little research into the actual comments themselves so far – much of the research in this space has been focussed on interviews with journalists instead. How has such commenting evolved over time, and what do journalists do there now?

The study worked with a macro sample of 110m comments (by journalists and readers), focussed in on a meso-sample of 26 journalists whose comments were coded closely, and followed this up with interviews in 2012 and 2018. Overall, numbers of comments on the articles have grown strongly from 2011 to 2016, but declined somewhat since then (but still stand at around 20m comments per year in 2017).

This is also because articles by journalists have been increasingly open to comments; since the arrival of Kath Viner as editor of The Guardian this has been reversed somewhat, however – but this has also resulted in the average number of comments per article skyrocketing (to some 1,800 comments in 2017). Comments are good for the paper itself – they generate reader engagement –, but the do not necessarily add quality to the discussion.

The total frequency of comments by journalists has been high especially from 2010 to 2013 (at almost 900 per year), and has declined markedly since then – but during that time, three journalists alone were responsible for 69% of all comments. Journalist commenters are also predominantly male – five female journalists in the sample contributed only 2.1% of comments, and ethnic minority journalists were also poorly represented.

Some 11% of all articles had at least one journalist comment, but these comments only tend to receive an average of 1.7 replies on average (this counts replies in the same thread only). Some 16.5% of journalist comments were attached to a colleague’s work – often from editors under articles they edited. The majority of such comments (60%) were under opinion and comment pieces.

Amongst other categories, journalist comments were arguing and debating with readers (22%), explaining journalistic practice (13%), providing corrections (12%), but rarely promoting the journalist or their work (0.7%).

The fluctuating patterns may be explained by different editorial philosophies. Under Alan Rusbridger, comments were strongly promoted; under Kath Viner, the dark side of commenting was recognised more strongly, and the newspaper took a more jaded view of the value of commenting, and came to see it as a distraction from the journalistic work. The volume of commenting was also seen as a problem – and the idea that early comments by journalists would keep a thread from becoming toxic did not pan out as articles received so many comments from readers so quickly. Also, the role of social media has affected commenting culture – comments now often happen on Twitter and as much as on the platform itself.