ENGAGING THE SOCIAL NEWS USER Comments on news sites and Facebook

One of the most common formats of audience participation in journalism consists of online reader comments in response to articles, weblogs, or online television and radio broadcasts. While initially the audience only commented on media platforms themselves, Facebook made it possible to outsource commenting to a third-party platform. The options users have, the rules commenters are obliged to follow, and the moderation regime they confront, could influence the quantity and quality of comments. In this study, we explore how news media deal with audience comments on Facebook and their own news site, and how this influences the quality and quantity of comments. We compared comments on news platforms and Facebook of 62 Dutch national and regional newspapers, public and commercial broadcasters, newsweeklies, national news programmes, and online news sites. Subsequently, we analysed the content of the comments with the qualitative text analysis tool MAXQDA. The results indicate that news media prefer outsourcing comments to Facebook although commenting on their own platforms is still possible. By discouraging anonymous responses, the quality of comments improved but above all the quantity of comments decreased after outsourcing comments to Facebook.