But hang on, don’t editors appreciate reader participation anymore? Well, it seems they do, but they’re tired of combatting racist and sexist comments, vulgar allusions and off-topic discussions that don’t offer any insight or value to other readers (or so they say).

The Reuters news agency has probably taken the most radical path. On its English-language website, readers can no longer post comments under news articles; commenting is confined to opinion pieces only.

“Readers can join the conversation about all Reuters journalism on Facebook (…) or on Twitter,” said Reuters Digital’s Executive Editor Dan Colarusso in November – in other words: go somewhere else and don’t bother us with your comments.

The magazine Popular Science has made a similar decision: “Because comment sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories,” wrote the magazine’s online content director Suzanne LaBarre in a move to explain the decision to completely shut off the comment function.

Others have taken to strictly moderating their comment sections: “We have a team that takes care of moderating comments almost day and night,” said Jochen Wegner, editor-in-chief of the German news platform Zeit Online, in an interview with the German online site Meedia). Wegner said he doesn’t want to do away with comments all together or put an end to anonymous commenting in an attempt to stop bad behavior. Zeit Online readers do have to register an account, but they can still post comments without disclosing their true identities. “This is very time consuming, but we think that one of the basic tasks of journalists is to allow for a free debate,” Wegner said.

The New York Times has taken another path. It presents their readers with two options: they can either voluntarily disclose their identities by supplying their real names and verifying their accounts or keep posting anonymously. The so-called “trusted readers” will be able to post comments that will immediately be published, while everyone else’s contributions will be held for review by the editorial team before being made public.

As mentioned, some media are trying to cultivate better conversations by outsourcing comments to social networks such as Facebook and Google+. The German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is one of the latest examples. SZ has mostly banned comments on its own website. However, under each article there is a link asking readers to leave a comment on Facebook. To compensate for the lack of an in-house commenting system, the newspaper has introduced a moderated debate forum with strict rules on two to three selected topics every day.

Some news websites cooperate with Facebook even more closely than the Süddeutsche Zeitung, following the launch of a plugin in 2011 that allows them to embed Facebook comments on their own sites. An increasing number of news platforms choose to do so in an attempt to moderate online behavior.

The Huffington Post’s US website has revamped its commenting system twice in just a matter of months. After shutting down anonymous comments in 2013, it gave up its own commenting system altogether and decided to embed Facebook comments in 2014. Users now automatically comment via their Facebook profile, a solution that is convenient for most people as they already have a Facebook account. At the Huffington Post, the hope is that Facebook’s real-name policy will cut down on trolling, not to mention that the site can also expect improved traffic through the increased visibility Facebook offers.

Good idea to outsource?

However, there are quite a few valid arguments on why anonymous commenting should be continued and why outsourcing comments to social networks such as Facebook or Google+ may not be such a good idea.

Firstly, there are groups of people for which a real-name policy could spell trouble. Just think of political dissidents and marginalized groups such as gays and lesbians. Would you post a comment under a controversial article if you were an opposition activist in China or a gay in Saudi Arabia?

Secondly, people who have a job that is somehow related to politics might be obliged to refrain from commenting publicly on certain issues. There may also be security issues if you work in law enforcement, for example.

In addition, interacting with readers has become a crucial element of journalism. By outsourcing comments, you give that element away to companies like Facebook. Not only does someone else control how reader comments on your article look and function, you also forgo your right to set the standards that comments have to meet.

Finally, social networks such as Facebook do not just require real names to fight bad online behavior. The companies collect data in order to build a profile of a user for advertising and marketing purposes. Do news organizations really want to support that kind of data obsession?

Author: Jannis Hagmann, edited by Kyle James

Photos: Creative Commons (Rob McMahon BY-NC; nolievr28 BY-NC-SA; Steve Garfield BY-NC-SA)

Graphic: flickr/mmapstone

Most reporters use a whole bunch of different online tools and apps such as Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress and Dropbox to make their work easier. To commemorate this year’s Safer Internet Day, onMedia highlights a few risks associated with some of the most popular journalism tools and suggests possible, more secure alternatives.

Skype

Functionality: Video conferences, chats with newsmakers, interviews and interview recordings.

Risks for journalists: Skype was always assumed to be safe because of its end-to-end encryption. But the Snowden revelations have revealed that the NSA has been listening to Skype since 2011 and it’s unclear to what extent other agencies are able to intercept the service. Skype “can no longer be trusted to protect user privacy,” says Eric King, head of research at Privacy International.

Possible solutions: Use Skype as if it were a public forum. Everything you say or write may be used against you.

Alternatives: Jitsi (encrypted text, voice and video messaging), Linphone (encrypted voice and video chat), Mumble (encrypted voice chat).

WhatsApp

Functionality: WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the word. It lets you send messages without having to pay for sms services although the person you are sending to also has to be using the app. It’s an easy way to stay in touch with the newsroom and colleagues while in the field, especially as you can exchange images, video and audio.

Risks for journalists: Currently, WhatsApp claims messages are encrypted but because the company won’t say what method they use, it’s difficult to know how secure the service is. There are reports that WhatsApp messages sent over wifi and other public channels can be decrypted. There are apps out there which try to make WhatsApp more secure.

Possible solutions: Resort to more secure apps

Alternatives: Pidgin (off-the-record messaging), TorChat (anonymous P2P chat), ChatSecure (formerly Gibberbot) and Xabber for Android.

Facebook

Functionality: You don’t really need to have Facebook explained to you, right? Journalists use this global social network to share their work, crowdsource information, stay in touch with colleagues and newsmakers, follow companies and news on their beats, subscribe to important people and participate in groups.

Risks for journalists: Facebook is a huge data collector. The list of your friends may influence the decision of local authorities to grant you a visa to work in a certain region, and the open groups you are a member of let strangers know about your interests even if your profile is closed to external visitors. Also, Facebook is constantly experimenting with new tracking methods.

Possible solutions: Be very careful publishing information on Facebook. Once it’s online, you lose control of it. Go to the privacy settings in the upper right corner of your Facebook page and make sure you have all the precautionary measures taken. Always log out of your Facebook account when surfing other websites.

Alternatives: To be able to use other, private social networks, you’ll need a certain level of technical proficiency. Of course you need to remember that it’s difficult to have the same reach as Facebook when using its alternatives. Diaspora is a community-run, distributed social network that allows you to be in control of your information. Other alternatives: Buddycloud, Friendica and RetroShare.

Twitter

Functionality: Twitter is good for following breaking news and breaking news yourself. You can also use it to collaborate with others, find communities, and follow trends and topics.

Risks for journalists: Everything you do on Twitter is visible. If you have geotagging enabled, it can be easy to locate you. The service is also a haven for malware attacks.

Possible solutions: Be careful what you post and whom you follow. Don’t create open lists unless you are absolutely sure you won’t get into trouble by doing this. Disable geotagging.

Alternatives: Sorry, there isn’t really one.

Gmail / Googlemail

Functionality: This is one of the most popular email clients with integrated tasks, contacts and calendar.

Risks for journalists: Gmail has fairly robust security for everyday use but it’s not advisable if you need to keep your communications secret. Google scans your email’s content to better target you with ads and also complies with government requests for information. Kapersky has more information about the risks here.

Possible solutions: Don’t use your Gmail account to discuss sensitive issues. Add two-step verification to your account to prevent third parties from cracking it.

Alternatives: MyKolab (hosted in Switzerland), Riseup.

Google Drive

Functionality: Create, store and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets in the cloud. The service is connected to your Google account.

Risks for journalists: Your information can be made available to government agencies.

Possible solutions: Use Google Drive only for documents with no great importance. Use local physical backup (external hard drives, USB flash drives) when possible.

Alternatives: ownCloud, SparkleShare, Tahoe-LAFS.

Google search

Functionality: Google search is pretty much the gold standard and definitely the most popular option for research on the web. There are a number of techniques such as advanced search that help you achieve better results.

Risks for journalists: Google stores your searches. This information can be made information available to government agencies upon request.

Possible solutions: Try other search engines.

Alternatives: DuckDuckGo (anonymous web searches), Startpage (private, unlogged web searches), YaCy (decentralized web search), Seeks Project (open decentralized platform for collaborative search).

Dropbox

Functionality: Store text, audio and video files in the cloud. Dropbox comes in handy when you need to synchronize your data across different devices.

Risks for journalists: Your data might be available to third parties.

Possible solutions: Always encrypt your data before moving it to Dropbox. You can use Boxcryptor or free encrypting tools like TrueCrypt or AxCrypt. Read more about file encryption here.

Alternatives: The same as for Google Drive: ownCloud, SparkleShare, Tahoe-LAFS.

Tumblr/Blogger/WordPress

Functionality: Publishing platforms for text, audio and video. They help journalists blog on issues, establish a web presence and thus become more visible to their audience.

Risks for journalists: Your data might be available to third parties.

Possible solutions: Try self-hosting. This will help you stay in control of your data. For example, WordPress offers an option to self-host your data.

Alternatives: WordPress.org (self-hosted website publishing), Noblogs (blog publishing platform based on WordPress), MediaGoblin (decentralized media publishing platform), Zenphoto (self-hosted media management system).

For more free alternatives to proprietary software, check out the website PrismBreak.

By Natalia Karbasova

Three years since it was founded, Storyful has attracted some major clients, including ABC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times, and generated hundreds of articles about its innovative take on news gathering – though the company has yet to break even. DW Akademie’s Kate Hairsine talks to Mark Little about why he started up a social media news agency in the first place, his belief in journalism and why he thinks journalists can make great entrepreneurs.

Where did the idea for Storyful come from?

I was a foreign correspondent for the Irish national TV station, RTE. In about 2009, I realized the job being done by professional journalists was increasingly being done by ordinary people, by people with camera phones which enabled them to share pictures and essentially create journalism. I realized that this was the opportunity to join forces with these newly empowered citizens and tell stories about the world. But the problem is as soon as everyone can tell a story, who do you listen to? A hundred hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every single minute. How do you find the video that actually shapes the great stories of our time? I realized that the only way to do that was to bring professional journalists back in to manage this overabundance of information. They would be the ones that would add context and shape the stories around these incredible images coming from places like Syria. So I thought, “let’s break the old news agency model, let’s start again from scratch” and that’s where Storyful came from.

Weren’t you concerned about leaving your safe job with a national broadcaster to become an entrepreneur?

Some people said to me later they thought I was leaving because I had had a nervous breakdown. I was leaving a well-paid job as the anchorman for the evening news program and it was a nice cushy lifestyle that I easily could have gotten used to. But I imagined my child 20 years later asking me, “what did you do Dad when you had that great idea?” and answering “nothing” – that would have been worse than falling flat on my face trying. I realized I wanted to be able to answer, “I tried”. On the other hand, it was also survival. I wanted to create a sustainable business model for the journalism that inspired me when I was a kid. And if I don’t do it, who else is going to do it? I think we all have a personal responsibility right now not to moan about the problems facing journalism. Instead, let’s do something and create something.

What skills did you bring with you that helped in founding a news agency?

Storyful was conceived so it wasn’t just about news; it is about stories and storytelling. Being Irish, I think we have a particular tradition of storytelling, it is something in my DNA. I had also been a foreign correspondent and I had been self sufficient. I had essentially been an entrepreneur in the field because I had set up the first Washington bureau for my station and I had been on my own in very tough situations. Getting up in front of a group of investors is far less scary when you have been shot at in Afghanistan. These experiences gave me the confidence to just do it. They also gave me a sense of vision. I had spent 20 years believing in journalism and that is a pretty infectious thing.

Where there times that you stood up in front of a group of investors and thought, “oh dear, I wish I knew more about business”?

I can’t count the amount of times that I have sat in rooms full of people who have MBAs and I just shut up because I didn’t know what they were talking about and that is still the case today. But I think one of the great things about being an entrepreneur and a journalist is that they are very complementary. They are both about leadership and about vision. Once you have those skills, you can learn everything else. You can’t learn vision and leadership. They are things that are built into journalism and that is what  makes journalists potentially great entrepreneurs.

Foreign correspondents aren’t renowned for their teamwork though – aren’t they too individualistic to inspire a team?

As a foreign correspondent, you are incredibly driven and egoistical to a certain extent. But at the same time, you have to have certain skills of persuasion to get your team to get in the jeep to follow you to the frontline or get on the plane with you where there is a risk of dying. So I have never felt there’s a contradiction between the two because that is also what business is about – it is about egotistical people with missions who manage to bring people with them.

It’s normal now to see YouTube videos and Twitter photos being used by serious news organizations but this is quite a recent phenomenon. How difficult was it three years ago to find investors for your idea of a social media news agency?

When I was leaving my previous job someone said, “you just said the word tweet on air” as if I had said an expletive. I remember thinking there was an underdeveloped notion of what was going on. It was of course much more difficult to try to raise half a million euro in Ireland in 2009 and 2010 when the country was going off the cliff. But at the same time, investors aren’t looking to imitate what is going on: they are looking for the next new thing. From that point of view, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade people who are by nature disruptive to invest in an idea where there was no market, there was no product, there were no landmarks and no precedent. There was nothing. There was just the sense of vision.

How are you making money?

We have built up a subscription model so we have news organizations around the world who pay us a monthly fee to discover and verify the most valuable content on the social web. This can be big news events but also trends that are catching fire on social media. In the past year, we have also developed a content licensing model. When we find a particularly compelling video that we think has the capacity to attract millions of views, we work in partnership with the uploader to make as much money as possible. We do that by revenue share on platforms such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN. We also do it by selling content though our partners and getting as many views as possible. And finally YouTube themselves have helped us build a business through managing the most compelling videos on their platform.

“Take your time in hiring the right people,” Little says

What kind of mistakes did you make when you first started?

One of the key mistakes you will make is picking the wrong people who don’t necessarily share your vision. People who don’t share your vision should not be on the journey with you and that is something that you don’t realize sometimes until it is too late. I think the other thing I realized was to be true to yourself. I would take decisions because I felt someone with more experience of business was advising me to do it even it didn’t feel right in my gut. All of the mistakes I have made are the things that didn’t feel true to me.

You say it’s important to employ people who share your vision. What kind of people are working for you?

We have 30 people working for us in Dublin, Atlanta (in New York State) and in Hong Kong. The vast majority are journalists. We have some old broadcasters like myself but we tend to find those who are the most adept when they come into Storyful are younger sub-editors who have worked in production, the kind of people who have worked catching mistakes for news organizations or newspapers. They are social media natives, who pay attention to detail and can tell you where the punctuation should go but are also good storytellers. They are the new breed of journalists who are going to thrive –  people who are not afraid of change, who are slightly pedantic, who are innovative but also ambitious and aggressive.

What are you personally getting out of Storyful?

To be honest, the biggest sense of achievement I have right now is not building Storyful but is building the team that built Storyful and inspiring people. I was 41 when I started Storyful. It wasn’t like I was a 15 year old in the basement inventing this technology. I have a wife, I have kids. I mortgaged my house and we lived on nothing. I didn’t get paid for a while and I had been very well paid. I think essentially asking them to come on the journey with me was really difficult. Other people have made sacrifices because they believed in what I told them and at times, they have suffered as well. So on a personal level, now we are three years in, I want to reward the people who believed in me. In addition, I am very proud to be part of a movement that I think will emerge, not from Silicon Valley or New York, but probably from Nairobi or Singapore. And if one person in Kenya or Burma or Brazil sees the example of Storyful and goes and founds a company, that is a better tribute than anything I could have got as a journalist.

Interview: Kate Hairsine

In your master’s thesis, you explored the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. Is it possible to say that Twitter and Facebook helped topple president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for 30 years?

You could say “yes”. My research results show that Twitter and Facebook played a significant role in the process of mobilizing protesters. In the Egyptian context, Facebook in particular helped accelerate the protests.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the revolution wouldn’t have happened without these online platforms. The majority of the social media activists I interviewed believe that it would have taken a few more years to overthrow Mubarak’s government.

The virtual networks enabled the dramatic growth of what was initially a small protest movement. Especially in the year preceding the 18 days of mass protests in January and February 2011, the number of Facebook users increased rapidly. The  Arab Social Media Report illustrates this numerical growth exceptionally well.

How does your research differ from the multitude of other studies on the topic?

In the past few years, there has been a great deal of hype surrounding social media and its role in the process of political transformation. Cyberoptimists and social media skeptics have been debating each other for years over the Twitter revolution and the Facebook effect.

The mass media has often pursued these debates in highly speculative ways. In light of this, in my master’s thesis I wanted to compile and analyze my own empirical data about what concrete roles social media platforms really played in the revolution in Egypt.

User statistics and network analysis clearly demonstrate the fundamental significance of certain social media tools in processes of political transformation. Previous studies indicated that there was a real need for studies on collective identity formation and organization mechanisms. I wanted to dig deeper and find out why and how people used social media to mobilize protests in a country like Egypt.

Which methodical approach did you use?

I conducted expert interviews in accordance with the method of qualitative content analysis developed by the social researcher, Philipp Mayring. This means, it was essential to use existing studies and theoretical assumptions as a starting point for my own methodological approach. The interviews I conducted were built on a clearly defined category system.

After transcribing the conversations I had in Egypt, I spent several weeks analyzing and structuring the large amount of text. This allowed me to explore key aspects, but also to identify variables and relationships between them which hadn’t been thought of so far..

In Egypt, what effect did social media have on the formation of collective identity?

During the course of the revolution, it was photos and videos more than anything, that helped develop a collective identity, or more precisely, helped develop a form of solidarity. In particular, images of police brutality and police assaults, which were distributed on Facebook and other platforms such as YouTube and Flickr, made people more willing to take to the streets and risk being injured or even killed. This is because as well making people more angry, the images also lowered people’s fear threshold.

Overall, social media networks made people feel as if they were part of a bigger protest movement. As a result, they could then collectively dare to move from the online world to the offline world, to the streets and public places of their country.

(Flickr user Nasser Nouri CC)

Your master’s thesis also explored the organizational aspects of the protests. What did you discover?

That it was the ‘real’ organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ultras who played a central role in coordinating the mass protests in Egypt in January and February 2011. Social media had a very restricted role in this respect.

Some experts even believe that social media was responsible for causing chaos and anarchy. Activists don’t necessarily view this as something negative. People were being mobilized and wanted to actively contribute to political change. However, the organizational potential of Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests in the long-term, to define collective goals and to create effective structures seems to be limited.

Essentially, there is a need to differentiate between the diverse functions that Facebook and other social media networks have. For example, when you discuss the organizational function of a specific platform, then you need to analyze the coordinating aspect and not the networking function or how it generates growth. Unfortunately, because people fail to define and specify concepts, they often reach non-scientific conclusions. As a result, the role of social media has been, and still is, often overestimated

The protesters in Egypt used many social media platforms, primarily Twitter and Facebook. Were these used in different ways?

That is a very important point because it is necessary to differential the roles of the individual platforms. Technical requirements alone meant that different platforms are used for different purposes.

While Facebook was used to exchange enormous amounts of audiovisual content and to form networks and discussion groups, Twitter was primarily used for logistical purposes in Egypt. For example, people exchanged information on how to deal with a tear gas attack. On the streets people could use Twitter to rapidly exchange information in real time about actual incidents.
That way, protesters could react quickly and evade attacks by security forces or bypass blockades. While the wider population used Facebook, it was primarily those activists who were extremely engaged that used Twitter inside and outside of Egypt.

You interviewed social media activists in Egypt. What kind of people are they?

I interviewed 10 social media experts in Cairo in total. The majority of them were young professionals of Muslim faith. Their average age was 25. The crucial factor for my research is that all of those I talked to had taken part in political protests both on the Internet as well on the streets during Egypt’s revolution.

Among others, I interviewed the marketing manager of a leading online news site, the head of a human rights organization, video journalists employed at a private television station and an editor at a state-run newspaper. By conducting research with people from a mix of traditional and new media, I had a broad spectrum of perspectives which enabled me to draw conclusions about the Egyptian media system in a wider sense.

Did the protest movement have leaders?

Interestingly, there are differing opinions about this. Even though the people I interviewed could themselves be considered central figures in the Egyptian protest movement, they don’t see themselves this way. Rather, if anything they are modest and prefer to stay in the background.

Fundamentally, this aspect is very controversial. Some believe that the protest, at least on the Internet, didn’t need any leaders and that the egalitarian forms of organization and communication of Facebook groups are decisive characteristics of social media.

Others believe that there were indeed so-called ‘leadership figures’ who were often created and highly stylized by the mass media. My interview partners mentioned famous bloggers, but also writers such as the Egyptian author Alaa Al-Aswani, who was also a spokesperson for the Kefaya movement.

How would you describe the relationship between social media and traditional media in Egypt?

There was a clear interplay between new and traditional media during the protests in Egypt. Instead of having to create their own content, traditional media, both within Egypt and in other countries, could access user-generated content produced by the protesters. And vice versa, the effect of social media was dependent on television and the daily newspapers because those people who didn’t or rarely use the Internet received the majority of their information from private television stations.

There was a five-day Internet blackout during the protests. The blackout can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, protesters still went out on the streets to demonstrate even though they had no Internet access. On the other hand, many believe that is was the social media blackout that caused people to be so angry that they went out and protested in every-increasing numbers.

Some of the experts I interviewed voiced their frustration about national and international reports on the revolution lacking neutrality. In contrast, the content posted on Facebook and other platforms was often viewed as being much more reliable. But also certain independent Egyptian newspapers such as El Shourouk, Al Masry Al Youm and Al Doustour were used as important channels of information.

Eira Martens is a recent graduate of the DW Akademie Master program in International Media Studies. After completing her first degree in Social and Economic Sciences with a major in Communication Science and International Relations from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Martens worked for various NGOs and media organizations in Germany, Australia, South East Asia and Latin America. Most recently she was employed as a Junior Media Consultant at the German development organization, GIZ, in Nicaragua. Martens continues to contribute to academic research in the field of media development cooperation as research assistant at DW Akademie.

Danh-Quy Nguyen at DW GMF

You graduated from DW’s International Media Studies program last year. Now, you’ve been invited back as a guest and expert for a panel-discussion at the DW Global Media Forum. How does that make you feel?

Firstly, I feel great and honored to be invited by my teachers and colleagues. I think it’s an experience that not everyone can have. So I feel very happy. Secondly, I’m also very happy to see my old friends and many colleagues from Deutsche Welle.

What do you miss most about Germany?
What I miss most from Germany is lots of trees, lots of green and the Rhine River.

Can you apply the knowledge that you learned at DW to your work in Vietnam?
Of course! I learned a lot at DW and I use it in my work every day. The most important thing I learned from the DW Master’s program is how to communicate with people from different countries and different cultures. This is very important for my daily job. As Managing Editor, I have to communicate with different editors and people from the fashion industry all around the world.

New Professions for New Media was the topic of the panel that you participated in at this year’s DW Global Media Forum. What do social media mean for your magazine?
In my magazine, we use social media more as a marketing tool than something that produces serious content. We use Facebook, for example, just to stay in touch with our users and fans, not as a channel to send out serious messages. At EllE magazine, the best goes into the print edition and not online.

Is it true that Facebook was unofficially blocked in Vietnam until early this year? So do you have any problems at work?
No, it’s not true. I think Facebook is blocked in Vietnam for some hours before some events, but not more than a day. So I don’t have any difficulties.

Interview by Juan Ju