Online Story Commenting

Abstract

Story comments offer a form of citizen engagement on news sites potentially important to democratic discourse. Yet few issues vex newsrooms more because of abusive rants, often from unnamed sources. This controlled experiment set out to test the “conversationalness” of commenting, using newly identified variables that theoretically measure the concept of journalism as a conversation. The study also tested whether commenting might help with reader trust. The data show that commenting's best indicators of conversation are perceived friendliness and social presence. But comments do not appear to help with journalism's most important values of perceived credibility and expertise.