Open up your newsroom to people who want to ask questions and contribute story ideas. More perspectives and more diverse ideas will better serve your community, especially in newsrooms that are still not representative of the populations they serve.

“Ultimately, no matter how good your intentions, no matter how smart you are, how fair-minded or thoughtful and everything, you’re limited,” Brandel said. She suggested investing more power in the hands of audiences when it comes to thinking up story ideas — a practice that could also help smaller newsrooms where journalists face time restraints. 

Don’t be too reliant on social media such as Facebook and Instagram, as you’re not in control of theirchanging algorithms. Instead, build a direct relationship with your audience. Brandel advises using email addresses.

For example, when people ask a question or vote through the Hearken platform, they have the option to give their email addresses. They can also opt in for a newsletter.

“Our approach moves toward a world where young people and news brands have more of a direct relationship,” she said.

Brandel said she is convinced audiences are not passive news consumers. 

“I fully believe that there are people out there who would love to participate, love to be heard, love to contribute productively to the newsroom,” she said.

However, be careful. Some media organizations ask a lot from their audience without ever acknowledging their help and informing them of what they’re doing with their contribution. Do the opposite and reward your audience for participating. Ask for something small that doesn’t take too much time. Keep them involved and updated on what happened thanks to their help.

“People will do lots of things for attention,” said Brandel. So give people their moment of fame on social media and credit them for their contribution.

“Fundamentally, human beings are curious, no matter where they live or where they come from,” said Brandel.

However, be aware of cultural differences when adapting to your specific audience. When Hearken partnered with Finland’s YLE, Brandel learned that Finnish audiences are more reticent to be mentioned and rewarded publicly. In contrast, Americans are particularly excited to be featured.

Brandel also recommended involving your audiences and showing them what journalism is like.

“[Journalists] just assume people know the story took three months and 50 interviews,” she said. "They don’t go out and say ‘We’re giving you a Rolls-Royce piece of journalism right now.’ They could do a better job making that clear.”

Explain to your audiences why paying for their news can be necessary to produce quality journalism and maintain a healthy democracy. In a recent global survey of news consumers by the Reuters Institute, 67 percent of those surveyed said they would not pay for online news, whatever the price, in the U.S. It goes up to 75 percent in the U.K.

Spend that time developing trustful relationships with your audiences — especially in the U.S., wherelack of trust is a real problem for media.

While most of her work is taken up with weeding out mild offence, there are also times, especially on a topical discussion show like This Morning, when the conversation can take a darker turn.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/feb/03/a-working-life-website-moderator

Our definition: Journalism crowdsourcing is the act of specifically inviting a group of people to participate in a reporting task—such as newsgathering, data collection, or analysis—through a targeted, open call for input; personal experiences; documents; or other contributions.

Using that definition, most crowdsourcing generally takes two forms:

We argue that crowdsourcing requires a specific call-out. If a newsroom simply harvests information or content available on the social web, we don’t believe this constitutes crowdsourcing. For us, the people engaging in crowdsourcing need to feel they have agency in contributing to a news story.

We acknowledge that crowdsourcing efforts don’t fit neatly into discrete classification, but for the purpose of this report, we’ve organized our typologies into six different calls to action:

But at their worst, they are something else entirely.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments

That system, however, wasn’t particularly well-received by The Huffington Post’s readers, who said that the system would give Facebook too much reader data and limited readers’ ability to speak freely. “I think this is a horrible, horrible idea. Being able to express an opinion in anonymity, without fear is one of the best things about the internet,” one Huffington Post reader wrote at the time.

http://digiday.com/publishers/comments-sections/

Turning comments off might, then, save a paper money, whether in paying out legal claims or paying for moderators.

Meanwhile, for those who prefer to let their readers comment, it pays to keep a close eye on what they’re saying. No one likes censorship, least of all those who work in the media, but no one wants to be sued, either.

http://www.legalcheek.com/2016/02/comment-is-free-but-it-can-be-costly/