At a time when many publishers are trying to improve comments or else refuse to permit reader participation in the first place, Above the Law — which is a must-read for many lawyers and even judges — continues to let readers be as abrasive as they like. For example, here’s a screenshot of responses to a story by editor Elie Mystal about a scholarship for white people at Columbia:

I spoke this month with Mystal and John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media (the company that owns Above the Law), to learn more about the site’s comment philosophy and its effect on business strategy.

“If you write on the internet, people will say horrible things about you. We allow them to say it to our faces — if we didn’t, they’d say it on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr,” said Mystal. “Anyone who wants to write professionally better be prepared for ad hominem, unfair personal criticism. That’s not just part of media in 2013.”

Above the Law’s writers, most of whom are Ivy League law school graduates, are frequent targets of personal vitriol by readers, but Mystal says he still appreciates them.

“Commenters got me my job. Online people voted me in. I remember that when they’re screaming about how I look like a walrus.”

The commenters also serve as a vital part of the site’s overall content and business strategy. Lerner explained that the story comments appear as separate web pages, which allows Above the Law to sell additional ads, and that the site also works with comment platform Disqus to sell sponsored comments on its app. And, contrary to popular wisdom, advertisers aren’t skittish about their brands appearing next to off-color stories (like this one about a lawyer who invoked the First Amendment to excuse “slut-shaming” someone who turned him down) – a quick look shows that most of ATL’s sponsors are big and boring professional firms.

“It’s not like five years ago when a lot of advertisers didn’t know how the internet works,” said Mystal. “They realize there’s horrible comments on the Washington Post too.”

Above the Law readers can flag comments as offensive but that doesn’t mean the editors will respond. The only thing likely to be pulled down is something that offends absolutely everybody — “no one one cares if you’re offended”, says Mystal, adding that moderating each comment would be a full time job.

Ultimately, the no-holds-barred policy is not just simpler for the editors to oversee, but may also offer a more authentic view of humanity than the curated comments of other forums:

“I used to work in a big firm in downtown Manhattan, and there were some racists there. We’re the legal community, and there’s people who hold racist, homophobic views — you’re going to meet people like that. Those people may be your boss.”

(Image by ArTono via Shutterstock)

While BuzzFeed has relied on reader content for years, the new vertical will increase the visibility of such contributions. It will also increase the chances of a viral pay-off from the site’s high-tech publishing tools. The new “Community” section includes a formal submission process that permits users to submit one post per day until their (what else) “Cat Power” increases, which will allow more frequent submissions.

“Community has always been a huge part of our site — some of our best posts have come from community submissions — and now we want to reinvent community for the social web,” editorial director Scott Lamb said in an email statement.

BuzzFeed’s decision to expand the scope of user-generated offerings comes at a time when media outlets are increasingly looking to commenters as a source of talent and future hires. My colleague Mathew Ingram explained the phenomenon well earlier this week in “Want a job at Gawker Media? You can get a head  start by being a regular commenter.”

The new section is consistent with BuzzFeed’s improbable quest to become more serious and more inane at the same time. In recent weeks, the site has been at forefront of major news stories like the Boston bombings while also churning out its regular fare like “14 cats who think they’re sushi.”

Hiring a staffer from the comments isn’t something that came out of left field for Jalopnik: in fact, the site’s editor, Matt Hardigree, more or less telegraphed his intention to start doing this in February, when he launched the new version of the site’s comment system, which is based on Gawker’s proprietary Kinja platform — a model that essentially gives every commenter their own blog where their discussions are highlighted. As Hardigree put it in a note about the redesign:

You’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.

Comments as “a farm system” for a blog

Hardigree said in a blog post about Ballaban’s hiring that while Jalopnik and other Gawker sites have hired commenters to be writers before — including Ryan Tate, now a writer at Wired, who was hired (ironically) after he trashed a job ad posted by Gawker — this is the first time it has taken someone from the pool of Kinja-based commenter/bloggers. The Jalopnik editor said he was “particularly impressed with [Ballaban's] passionate Suzuki eulogy and evaluation of American cars.”

In a discussion we had with Nick Denton before the launch of the Kinja platform, the Gawker Media founder said one of his goals for the new system was to even the playing field between commenters and writers — to make it easier to highlight good content from readers, and give that the same prominence as writing from the actual staff of the network’s blogs. In a note earlier this year, he called it a “a farm system for the main Gawker teams.”

Other media outlets that have hired commenters include political blog network Daily KOS and The Atlantic, where Yoni Appelbaum was such a frequent and eloquent commenter on writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog that the magazine asked him to be an occasional contributor and then eventually hired him. Coates’ blog is known for its thoughtful comments — so much so that the Atlantic writer actually thanked his commenters when he won a National Magazine Award for his writing.

Critics such as Buzzfeed writer John Herrman argue that there is little value in reader comments, and some high-profile bloggers have stopped allowing them. But blogs such as Coates’ and that of Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson (where at least one startup, Engagio, was born out of a discussion on his blog) show that there can be value in comments when a writer or a site takes an interest in engaging with readers. And in some cases, it can even turn into a job.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Tang Yan Song

At an ad industry event in New York on Wednesday, an Atlantic Digital executive explained what the company had learned from a January debacle involving the Church of Scientology. (In case you missed it, the Atlantic pushed the boundaries of so-called “native advertising” by publishing a feel-good “sponsored story” about the religion — or cult, if you prefer — that included only positive reader comments.)

“The biggest mistake in retrospect was that it wasn’t harmonious to our site and it didn’t bring any value to our readers,” said VP and General Manager Kimberly Lau, at the event, which was hosted by native ad shop Sharethrough. “The second mistake was allowing the marketing team to moderate comments in a way that wasn’t transparent.”

Lau’s comments echo the Atlantic’s earlier apologies for the incident which, by all appearances, was a one-off mistake. But her remarks stand out because of where she made them: on a panel with representatives from Gawker, Vice and College Humor — three publications that regularly mix advertising into their editorial process and that expressed sympathy for the Atlantic’s predicament.

“There’s no other way to make money without doing this kind of advertising,” said Vice’s CCO Eddy Moretti, who added that Vice would have run the Scientology story. Meanwhile, Jason Del of Gawker (“a full-service content, event and video shop”) suggested that part of the blowback to the Scientology story came about because the sponsored format was novel to its readers.

So is all this unfair to the Atlantic —  so-called native advertising is a lifeline for publishers, why can’t it cash in like everyone else? The problem, as Lau explained, is:

“It goes back to the difference between entertainment and journalism,” she said. “There’s a higher bar for a brand like the Atlantic.”

This goes to the crux of the matter — sites that cater to comedy, entertainment or celebrity news can inject sponsored fare into their streams with relative safety. Serious news and intellectual publications, however, must take extra care to preserve the integrity of their editorial content.

In the bigger picture, this extra scrutiny of news brands may limit their ability to garner new online income. But the good news, for the Atlantic at least, is that the company has been profitable for several years and, according to Lau, 59 percent of its overall advertising revenue is digital.

Speaking of native advertising, be sure to attend paidContent Live this April where Andrew Sullivan and other leading media figures will discuss their business strategies, including native advertising.

(Image by Phuriphat via Shutterstock)

In his post on the official Google blog, entitled “A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank,” the Google staffer notes that the company has repeatedly warned about the dangers of links — including those on advertorial pages — that are designed to pass some of the hosting site’s PageRank (in other words, its status in Google’s search index) to the company paying for the links:

“Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations.”

Sites that host such content can be penalized

The penalties for doing this, Cutts says, including “losing trust in Google’s search results,” as well as a reduction of the site’s PageRank status, and lower rankings for the site in Google’s search results. The proper way to avoid this kind of penalty is to use what’s called a “nofollow” tag at the end of the URL for a paid link, which tells Google not to assign any PageRank to the page on the other side of that link.

According to Search Engine Land, the Google post may have been triggered in part by the behavior of a number of British local newspaper sites such as the The Worcester Standard and This Is Dorset, which were hosting advertorial content from an online flower-delivery service called Interflora. Even though the posts clearly say “ad features” and “advertisement,” the links to the company’s website and other related links don’t have the nofollow tag attached.

David Naylor, a consultant who specializes in search-engine optimization or SEO, described in a post of his own how the Interflora content had broken the rules, and how the company’s own PageRank had declined sharply as a result — and he also noted that the PageRank of the local news websites that posted the content hadn’t just declined, but had actually dropped to zero. According to Naylor, such a massive drop for a single infraction is unusual.

Sponsored content is growing in popularity

The Atlantic has been in the news recently for its experiments with sponsored content, including a large feature on the Church of Scientology that was widely criticized. The magazine later apologized for the piece and said it was amending its rules on sponsored content, but it’s not clear whether those rules include adding “nofollow” tags (the Scientology piece has been removed). A survey of some of the Atlantic’s recent sponsored content showed no links at all.

BuzzFeed is also known for its sponsored-content program — in fact, the site carries no traditional advertising whatsoever. The use of this kind of advertorial sparked a critical post from blogger Andrew Sullivan at his Daily Dish site, in which he suggested that blurring the line between editorial and advertising the way BuzzFeed does is unethical and disturbing (Note: We’ll be discussing alternative monetization methods with Justin Smith of the Atlantic, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and Andrew Sullivan, among others, at paidContent Live in April).

All Google really seems to care about, however, are the links in this kind of content: in one of the sponsored posts that Sullivan criticized, about the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 4 console, a link to a contest Sony is running did not have a nofollow tag attached, but — like the Atlantic — many of the other sponsored posts we looked at on the BuzzFeed site contained no links at all.

In a post on Twitter, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said that all of the paid content that appears on the site goes through Google’s DART system (which is part of its Doubleclick advertising unit) and therefore doesn’t pass PageRank.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Brian A Jackson and David Naylor

It should probably come as no surprise that Gawker Media is in the latter camp, since founder Nick Denton has a penchant for zigging while others are zagging, and is more than happy to rip up much of his existing network in order to try something new. The latest new thing is the Kinja discussion platform, which Denton talked about with me last year just before it launched — describing it as the core of the Gawker empire’s future. The latest version of the platform was just rolled out to users at Jalopnik.

Every commenter now becomes a blogger

As Tim Carmody at The Verge describes in a post on the new features, the platform essentially turns every commenter into a blogger. Prior to the latest change, readers had a profile page that showed their latest contributions, but now they have what amounts to a full-fledged blog with publishing ability — complete with their own custom address at Kinja.com. And editor Matt Hardigree says that the site, and by extension other Gawker sites, will be looking at the comments as a source of content and even future hires:

“If you want, you’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.”

It’s worth noting that Gawker already has a history of hiring writers from its comment section, something that the political blog network Daily Kos has also done a number of times. And it’s not just blogs: Yoni Appelbaum, a PhD candidate in history, commented so intelligently on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts at The Atlantic that he was eventually made a guest blogger.

Denton’s plan with Kinja isn’t just to create platforms for Gawker readers to hold forth on whatever they wish — the new system is also designed to function as a potential marketing vehicle, with advertisers and brands encouraged to participate (and possibly even sponsor) discussions that begin in the comments on a story. This is just one of a number of revenue-generating experiments that Gawker is rolling out over the next little while, Denton says.

Others also want to turn readers into bloggers

And Gawker isn’t the only new-media entity that is trying to reinvent reader contributions: The Verge, which is published by Vox Media, has turned its discussion forums into content hubs of their own, and often highlights them on the front page (Note: Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The question-and-answer site Quora, meanwhile, has launched something that is like an amalgam of Gawker’s approach and The Verge’s: the site recently turned its reader forums into blogs — which means that every contributor to those forums now has a blog page. And as my colleague Jeff Roberts recently described, The Huffington Post has launched a “Conversations” feature that gives popular discussion threads their own webpage.

In a sense, these efforts are just an evolution of the approach that the Huffington Post took when it first launched, which was to give almost anyone who wanted it the ability to publish a blog post. Will these new players produce anything valuable, or just a lot of sound and fury?

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy King and Pew Center

Atwood, who left Stack Exchange — the company that manages Stack Overflow and a number of other similar sites — about a year ago, launched his new venture on Tuesday with a blog post in which he lamented the fact that commenting and user forums have not changed much in the past decade. The vast majority of these platforms, he says, still fail to capture real conversation and are too difficult or expensive to implement.

Figuring out who to trust is the holy grail

The Stack Overflow founder says his new platform, which is known as Discourse, differs from other commenting systems in a number of ways — including the fact that it is fully open source. Atwood used the blog-publishing platform WordPress as a model (see disclosure below), and says the company will rely on selling hosting, support and other services for revenue.

Discourse has raised funding from a group of venture backers including Greylock and SV Angel, although Atwood wouldn’t say how much (another hosted commenting solution, Livefyre, also just closed a round of financing).

In addition to some other innovations, such as links that automatically expand within a comment (in the same way Twitter’s “expanded tweets” do), Atwood says he is trying to build a reputation system that will grant users new abilities based on the level of trust the platform has in them. Although he doesn’t provide a lot of detail, in a comment on a Hacker News discussion thread he suggests that it will be based on behavior such as flagging abusive posts.

Measuring trust and rewarding good behavior is something online communities have been trying to do for years, with mixed success. Some believe that sites like Slashdot — which has a moderation platform that awards “karma points” for certain behavior and appoints moderators automatically — have a good solution to the usual problems of trolling and flame wars, while others argue that these systems are almost always fatally flawed. Metafilter (which charges users $5 to become members) has many fans, but it is also a relatively small community. Branch is another attempt to reinvent user forums and discussion as invitation-only hosted conversations.

Trust takes effort, not just algorithms

Atwood says he wants to use a badge system for rewards (something Huffington Post also uses), but Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an interview last year that a similar reward system his sites used was a “terrible mistake,” because it was easily gamed and encouraged the wrong kinds of behavior. Denton has since completely revamped Gawker’s commenting system in an attempt to make reader comments the centerpiece, as well as a potential business model.

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in a recent post, the Huffington Post has also launched what it hopes will be a new feature called Conversations, which allows popular comments to become full-fledged blog posts of their own. The Verge — a tech blog run by Vox Media — is doing something similar with its site, in order to try and encourage more discussion and community. But both take a lot of manual effort.

Veteran blogger Anil Dash pointed out in an insightful post in 2011 that one of the only ways to maintain and encourage a healthy conversation — regardless of what platform you use — is to be involved in those discussions yourself as much as possible (a point Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American also made recently). Unfortunately for publishers looking for a quick or inexpensive fix, that kind of engagement is almost impossible to automate.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72 and Yan Arief Purwanto

According to the memo, which Advertising Age has published in full, the former head of Gawker’s sponsored content business — which includes the sponsored conversations that Denton launched last year as part of the network’s new Kinja discussion platform — has left Gawker to run his own digital marketing firm, and former Conde Nast ad sales manager Andrew Gorenstein is taking over:

“We’re reaching for 40 percent revenue growth this year, an acceleration from 26 percent in 2012. We had six clients spend over $1M with us last year. Andrew’s new threshold is $5M. In recognition of Andrew’s success, he is being promoted to Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for traditional advertising, our content work for clients and the exploding e-commerce business.”

Denton said last year that ecommerce would be a focus for the company — noting that it was one of the original business models for Gawker but “we didn’t have the scale then to make it work” — but his latest memo makes it clear that the network is going full steam ahead in that direction. Gawker has posted a number of job listings for what it calls “commerce specialists” for sites like Kotaku (devoted to video games) and the female-focused site Jezebel.

Gawker is looking to hire “commerce specialists”

The job listings describe the position as “a new type of service journalism” that includes “everything from posts about the cheapest deal on something our readers need to introducing them to new things they’ve never seen,” and notes that Gawker will be deriving revenue from those posts (if you’re interested in alternative methods of monetization for media, we’re going to be discussing that on a number of panels at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As the listing describes it:

“Your beat is helping readers buy things. You’ll be delivering content about products that Kotaku readers know, love, or should own. You’ll have both a daily writing assignment and the freedom to pursue your own content ideas. If you’re interested in things like deal forums, coupon codes, giving your friends product advice, and Amazon.com, you’ll use all of those as inspiration to create your own new commerce content product.”

Gawker’s move towards what might be called “commerce journalism” (a term Denton says he doesn’t like using) is just part of the broader trend within a number of digital-media entities of trying to expand their monetization methods away from the declining banner ad business. Sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker are promoting their sponsored content offerings as the solution — although some see that approach as an ethical minefield and point to examples of poor judgment like The Atlantic‘s recent widely criticized Scientology feature.

In a sense, Gawker’s move is just another variation on “native advertising,” which tries to make ad-related content look as much like a site’s traditional fare as possible. Whether the network runs into Atlantic-style problems with this new type of service journalism or advertorial remains to be seen.

This post was updated on February 15 to clarify that the term “commerce journalism” is not one that Nick Denton uses to describe what Gawker is doing with its affiliate link posts.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Gl0ck

For BuzzFeed, best know for viral fluff like “50 photos of cat heaven,” the new story is its most ambitious plunge yet into the rarified world of New Yorker or Atlantic-style essays. At a deeper level, BuzzFeed’s initiatives will test whether digital upstarts can replace the literary pleasure and cultural power of established print titles.

Turning to the story itself, ”Atari Teenage Riot: The inside story of Pong and the video game industry’s big bang” is a spry, deeply researched account of how a group of maverick computer types installed Pong games in TV sets and placed them in bars around San Francisco. The gaming pioneers earned millions in quarters and gave video games a permanent place in America’s cultural landscape.

The story is a good read but is more remarkable for the way it’s presented: in white on black letters and with vibrant pictures and animation that conjure up the era of Pong. It looks like this (in the story, the image is animated):

The Pong tale is not the site’s first long-form story, but it is the deepest that BuzzFeed has reached into its technical bag of tricks. The result is a new and distinct form of storytelling that strives to offer up the same depth and beauty of print magazines. It’s unclear, though, if BuzzFeed can also match the output of those publications.

“We are not a ‘GIF of the day’ or ‘one longform story per week’ kind of place, so it’s impossible to really set expectations on quantity here. We’re very much focused on the quality,” said Executive Editor Doree Shafrir, a former Rolling Stone editor who is one of several high profile hires BuzzFeed brought in this year.

Despite the lofty goals, there are still two wild cards here. One is whether BuzzFeed (or anyone else) can duplicate the aesthetic escapism of a print magazine; the Pong story, which I read on both a tablet and computer, was smart and the layout was beautiful, but it didn’t feel as relaxing as reading the New Yorker on the couch.

Second, there is the business question. It’s terrific news that BuzzFeed’s ambitions stretch beyond cats and OMG, but can they pay for them? After all, the state of online advertising means BuzzFeed can’t (for now, at least) fund its essays with high-priced Tiffany’s or Cartier spreads. At the same time, the site may be hard-pressed to apply its “native advertising” approach to long-form stories.

In the bigger picture, BuzzFeed is one of several disruptive publishers helping to define what long form will look like in the digital age. Others include The Verge and Gawker which are likewise offering free, quality essays. Meanwhile, platforms like Byliner and Atavist are providing new ways for authors to charge for long-form content. For now, it’s too soon to say if these companies will come to displace the New Yorker as a new form of magazine — or if, instead, there will be room for all to flourish.

(Image by alphaspirit via Shutterstock)

Update: Many of these sites were impacted when Con Ed shut off power to lower Manhattan.

Gawker is temporarily down because the 57th Street Crane just flooded our servers with sea foam, or something. Back with you shortly.—
  (@Gawker) October 29, 2012

Due to #Sandy we're experiencing technical difficulties and are working to be back up as soon as possible.—
Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) October 29, 2012

Pushing out stuff through Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr while we resolve our site issues, you guys! Follow and like us.—
  (@BuzzFeed) October 30, 2012

BuzzFeed and Gawker are down. You may experience an unfamiliar emotional reaction to events. This is known as earnestness and should pass.—
  (@pourmecoffee) October 29, 2012

Daily Kos servers being powered by generators.—
Markos Moulitsas (@markos) October 29, 2012

Con Ed has started shutting off power in Brighton Beach and parts of lower Manhattan bit.ly/XJdxed—
NBC New York (@NBCNewYork) October 30, 2012

#ConEd Manhattan outages were caused by flooding in company substations and engineers are working hard to correct the problem—
Con Edison (@ConEdison) October 30, 2012

To put the media outages into perspective, more than 3 million people in the storm’s path have no power, according to The Weather Channel’s Hurricane Central.

Stay tuned for updates.

Update 2 (1:15am ET): Gawker is still down completely, and BuzzFeed has only partially recovered, with many story pages still unavailable. The site’s team is instead using Tumblr to update its readers on the hurricane.