At a U.S.-based local news publication planning to use Discourse for our journalism, I’d like to voice support for this general direction.
If the goal is to improve the discourse around civic issues covered by news media, and the primary obstacles identified are onboarding staff and user friction: I’d rather think about the solution as Discourse being used as a CMS, where a category can publish to a separate domain for the “news publication.”
The technical aspects discussed here around embedding comments, interface, authentication, and user friction between two sites seem at least structurally helped by natively using one system for both publication and community/comments.
As an internal collaboration tool for a newsroom, Discourse is amazing. As a tool for healthy discussion, Discourse is amazing. But actually creating a distinct publication with content from Discourse is difficult and what I see as our biggest pain point.
I recognize it is not what Discourse is designed for. I’m sharing some thoughts mostly because I appreciate any thought of the news industry here.
Understanding that this isn’t at all attractive for CDCK, I would think this could be handled in improving the Wordpress or WooCommerce plugins, which post articles to Discourse and embed replies on Wordpress articles. I think @simon would have mentioned that if it was relevant.
That would be my preference. Specifically, two-way posting and improving the user-authentication pathways.
Staff onboarding seems like it’s not a Discourse problem, but it would have a greater chance of success if staff are using the same system for their CMS instead of having to use two separate systems. As mentioned, if staff are more engaged, then commenting users may be.
As a separate note, I think it’s relevant to point out that there are legal and resource concerns newsrooms have around user-generated content.
Many newsrooms are under-funded and the nature of their coverage (public, controversial, general interest) mean that discussions around it are more likely to tip into toxic areas. Staff moderation may not be able to keep up. I think the signal to noise ratio is different than what you see with most Discourse uses. It seems to me that healthy communities need to have some degree of exclusivity and the news media you have in mind are probably not exclusive in the topics they cover.
This is all to say that newsrooms may be reluctant to dive deep into any commenting system because of the legal risks of not getting it right. If I post an untrue comment on a newspaper’s article, it could be considered misinformation, while an untrue reply on meta might just seem amateurish. A lawyer would say that we should review and edit each comment before it’s actually posted. Basically: Write a Letter to The Atlantic - The Atlantic
In my opinion the comparisons to social media are fraught, but building community around journalism is something I am very keen on.