Nick Diakopoulos

During my stay at the Sacramento Bee in 2009 I began studying the commenting system that the online paper was using, called Pluck. I became interested in how the newsroom dealt with quality issues in the online comment discourse. This was an important issue to the newspaper as they perceived it as impacting their standing and credibility in their community.

Drawing on newsroom interviews, an online survey, and content analysis of about 54,000 comments collected from the moderation system, I characterized the comment discourse on SacBee.com, including the relationship between comment quality and the consumption or production of news information. I also explored the motivations for both readers and writers of comments. Finally, I looked into newsroom strategies for dealing with low quality comments.

In ongoing work I’m looking into the temporal characteristics of news comments including trends and patterns in sentiment, topics, tempo, and comment length. I’m also interested in exploring how news commenting systems could be redesigned in light of findings concerning the individual motivations of comment readers and writers.