Look Ahead: Improving Audience Engagement

After discussing the difficulties newspapers face when trying to manage digital interactive spaces, staff from the New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla-Knight OpenNews teamed up to change things.

The Coral Project (coralproject.net) is a collaboration between the three media partners with a goal of improving “digital community on news sites through open-source software and renewed best practices,” said Greg Barber, Washington Post director of digital news projects and Coral Project director of strategy and partnerships.

The project is in its early stages, and right now, they’re building a team of engineers and developers, as well as speaking with publishers, readers, contributors, and researchers to generate ideas. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation already pledged $3.89 million to support the project. Although there isn’t a single release date, the software will be iterated upon throughout the grant period, Barber said.

Online, readers now can comment and share opinions about their experiences, and this, Barber said, is what adds depth and character to journalism, and much like a coral reef in nature, the project aims to “protect and nurture other communities.”

“From a business perspective, it’s critical that publishers strengthen their relationships with readers—even more so since the rise of social media. Part of our value proposition for readers is that we’re human, and that we’re a part of their physical or digital community,” he said.

For publishers, the Coral Project works by allowing news sites access to open-source software to facilitate importing, storage, moderation and display of contributions to websites, including images, video, and text.

“News publishers of all sizes are struggling with what to do about their comments. Many don’t have a clear comment strategy except ‘try to keep the abuse to a minimum.’ Some publishers are letting Facebook run their comment platform, while others are closing comments altogether” said Coral Project lead Andrew Losowsky, who was recently hired full-time for the position. “We believe that the future of journalism has to include a truly engaged audience, and currently, we are failing our readers by not giving them and ourselves the tools to enable that to happen.”

He added that the newspapers will continue to have their own teams, building their own community and commenting products, but the Coral Project’s “intention is for some of the tools (they) build to be integrated into the Post and the Times systems, where appropriate.”

For readers, the project will allow for better discussion and easier access to journalists.

“We want to make that experience more reliably satisfying,” Barber said. “Hopefully, it’ll be so good that readers who wouldn’t otherwise contribute might join in just to be a part of it.”