Harmony Out Of Dissonance

Since we launched the NPR Community, we've had more than 27,000 comments posted. The good thing is that the social media desk (made up of myself, Wright Bryan and Andy Carvin) has blocked only a tiny fraction of those.

For the most part, we've been happy with the conversation you all have created; we've learned a lot in the past couple of months, from how a community polices itself to more ordinary things like useful links and amazingly human tales about the toll of war.

Terrell Spencer's comment on Ivan Watson's story about a tumultuous marriage between an Iraqi woman an American serviceman was especially poignant.

He wrote:

I'm an Iraq War vet, and I've recently come out of PTSD. Fallujah was a hell hole. You can't live/fight there and it not mess you up. I'm a loving husband and father, I consider it my duty to sacrifice for my family. I love and respect critters, but 8 months ago I snapped at the world's loyalest dog for not coming. I beat her, pummeling her with my fists, screaming while choking her, then threw her off the porch. I was completely out of control. I never hit my wife, but I shamefully created a home where she and my son lived on edge. I'm better now, I've dealt with what happened over there. Why am I spilling all this? Because these people need help. They're hurt and messed up. These people are ashamed, and hurting. They should be rebuilt - not abandoned and condemned.

The comment was left amidst a hostile conversation. The gist of it is that, after struggling economically, the Iraqi woman in the story had turned to stripping to support her family in the United States. A lot of the comments were disconcerting in their judgment.

One of the mild ones came from Jan Shields, who wrote, "Where is the dignity and discipline that we associate with our veterans of war? Shameful. shameful, shameful!"

A couple of producers asked that the comment thread be closed for the story and we considered that seriously, but, then, out of the steam of the conversation emerged Spencer's earnest plea.

Part of the reason we launched community tools on the site was to open NPR to the outside but another big reason was that we thought the wisdom of the many would better inform the stories on NPR.

To see so little empathy given to such a human, flawed family was, to be honest, disheartening. Part of my greatest hope for a community like this is that we go back and forth civilly on a diversity of opinions and come to find some understanding.

But I guess the lesson learned with Spencer's comment is that sometimes to come to that understanding, we need a little tousling, that sometimes out of dissonance emerges harmony.

Next Time: A lighter fare: We look at the NPR Community's top favorites.
The Time After Next: We consider two new discussion rules.

-- Eyder Peralta

9:39 AM ET | 11-14-2008 | permalink

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New Feature: NPR Groups

This morning, we rolled out some new social networking features on the Web site and addressed some bugs as well.

The biggest thing we've done is added a new community-building tool called NPR Groups. We now have the ability to create individual communities on the site that feature their own discussion boards, a group blog, event listings, and galleries for user-generated photos and video. They're not unlike the groups you see available on Facebook and other social networking sites.

With today's release, we've set up groups capability for almost 300 NPR member stations and station networks. You can browse or search the list of stations in our new station group directory. Initially, most stations won't have the new tools activated for their group pages, but you can still friend them by going to their group page and clicking the "join" button on the right side of the page. Stations with group pages each get to decide for themselves whether they'll use the new community tools or not, so not all of your favorite stations will have the full functionalities set up. One example of a station that has just activated the community tools on the site is WDAV Classical Public Radio in Davidson, NC. If you've already listed any favorite stations by editing your account on NPR.org, you'll automatically be added to those groups; they'll also appear on your user profile as well.

The new groups tools aren't just for stations. We're also making them available to NPR shows and journalists, so we can roll out new community spaces for a variety of topics. This will happen over the course of the coming weeks and months; I'll post updates about new groups on the blog.

Meanwhile, today's release addresses several bugs and other fixes, including some that were suggested by blog readers.

• Added text to the NPR.org registration page to clarify that user's full names are displayed in their profiles and comments

• Fixed the bug that prevented users with apostrophes, dashes and other characters in their names can register successfully

• Fixed our blog software so blog posts are displayed properly in various parts of the site in relation to our social networking tools

• Comments written with multiple paragraph no longer appear as one long paragraph

Like I said, I'll post updates as new groups roll out. In the meantime, please feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments.

-- Andy Carvin

Tags: community | groups | social networking | stations

3:03 PM ET | 10-21-2008 | permalink

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How Can We Improve Our Social Networking Tools?

As you probably have seen by now, we rolled out several new community tools on the NPR Web site this week, including user profiles and discussion threads for all of our stories. The feedback so far has been very positive, and a number of you have shared some great suggestions on how we can fine-tune these tools. I thought I'd recap some of the highlights and offer some feedback of my own.

Continue reading "How Can We Improve Our Social Networking Tools?" »

Tags: feedback | social networking

9:52 AM ET | 10- 1-2008 | permalink

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NPR Launches Online Community

There is something new on NPR.org today.

Starting now, it will be easier for you to talk to us, for us to talk to you and for you all to talk to each other. We are making it possible for anyone who registers with us to comment on a story and to create a profile page where many interesting things can happen. We are providing a forum for infinite conversations on NPR.org. Our hopes are high. We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative. This is important for the NPR community.

That last phrase -- "important for the NPR community" -- is not phony baloney corporate rhetoric, I promise.

The NPR community is a real thing; it is made up of the people who work here, the people who work at member stations, the people who listen to NPR on the radio, the people who use NPR.org and the people who support NPR. And many in that community think of ourselves as "NPR people." Few other American news organizations inspire such allegiance, have a real community and have "people." NPR does and it is vitally important to our health and growth to be able to talk to each other more and more openly.

NPR is late to this game, to be blunt. Many big news operations have had open comments and other "social media" functions for quite awhile. Some of you are grizzled veterans of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and online news commenting; for some this will be new. NPR has been cautious because we want to do it right; we want the comments and the conversations to be useful, friendly and civil; we want NPR employees to participate and talk about their work. We needed the right tools and the right philosophy to come together. Now it has.

NPR is a non-profit. We are not launching the project to get more "hits" that will make more money. We are doing it because it is the respectful thing to do for the NPR community. We expect to get story ideas, tips, insights into the world we cover, tough criticism and even the occasional compliment. We want to share more of the news we gather and the stories we tell with you. And we want to do all this in the NPR style -- with both dignity and self-deprecating lightness.

We won't hit the social media ball out of the park on the first swing. But we encourage you to create a profile and let us know what you like and don't like. We apologize in advance for any bugs you encounter. Also be sure to take a look at some of the more specific rules of the road. And if you don't like to do this stuff in public, here's my e-mail: editorial.director@npr.org.

--Dick Meyer

9:20 PM ET | 09-28-2008 | permalink

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Coming Soon: Social Networking on NPR.org

Over the last year or so, NPR has done a number of projects related to online communities and social networks, from Facebook to Flickr to Twitter. We'll continue to push further into services like these in a variety of ways, but we're also getting ready to bring it all back home with the launch of our own set of social networking tools on NPR.org.

Beginning the first week of October, we'll start rolling out a number of new features on the Web site:

User profiles. Visitors to the NPR site will be able to create a profile page for themselves. A profile page will let you upload an avatar, post a short bio and share your interests. This will also allow other users with similar interests to find each other. For example, if you say you're a fan of a particular band, you'll be able to click a link and see all the other people on NPR.org who like them as well. We'll also show you recent stories from the site related to that topic. Users will also be able to "friend" each other and post comments on each other's profile wall. We're also going to encourage NPR journalists and other staff to create their own profiles, so you can interact with them as well.

Discussion threads for all stories. Currently, discussion threads take place only on blogs, but we'll now have the ability to incorporate them in news stories. Each time a comment is posted, you'll be able to see the person's avatar, access their profile page, recommend their comment or even report it if you think it breaks the site's discussion rules. You can also sort the comments for each story by newest, oldest or most recommended. Meanwhile, site editors will follow the discussions to see what's taking place, so we can feature interesting comments either in the story itself, or even on the NPR homepage.

Story recommendations. Along with recommending comments in a given story, users will be able to recommend the story itself, not unlike the way you digg a story on Digg.com. This will let you explore stories on the site based on how often they've been recommended by the community.

Not too long after we roll out these features, we're also planning to launch a set of community tools not unlike groups on Facebook. We'll be able to set up community pages for shows and other NPR activities where users can start conversations in a discussion forum, upload photos and video, post event listings and the like.

We're really excited about rolling out these new features on the Web site. It's the latest step we've taken to open up the ways we interact with the public. NPR community members have always been eager to engage each other - just go to Facebook and take a look at the number of groups that have been created by members of the public. And we're eager to reach out to the public as well, using the Internet to foster new relationships between our journalists and the public. By creating new ways for that interaction to take place, we hope it'll impact the quality and diversity of our journalism in a positive way.

-- Andy Carvin

3:50 PM ET | 09-22-2008 | permalink

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