Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly Updates[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Watching the NCEW Opinion Pool focus groups in Seattle last year, I was struck by how often participants said they wanted to read strong and opposing opinions side by side.
These young men and women, age 21 to 38, wanted to make up their own minds after researched arguments on different, or multiple, sides of an issue. The participants were selected to answer NCEW's question of what online opinion pages should look like.
At The Seattle Times, we aim to please. So we launched a new online feature, called Civil Disagreement.
We have paired our most conservative columnist, Bruce Ramsey, with our more liberal columnist, Lynne Varner, to face off with each other over an issue weekly. Though they almost always disagree with each other, they are fond friends who do indeed, keep it civil.
Civil Disagreement so far appears exclusively on the editorial page blog, Ed Cetera, and is gaining something of a following. Varner and Ramsey now tend to write on hot topics in the news, which gets them some strong online traffic, after getting some lackluster response from readers over less exciting topics, such as Section 8 housing,
The hotter the topic, the more able we are to market the link to Seattletimes.com for placement on the home page or in a breaking news package. The Civil Disagreement entries asking "Kill all the pirates?" and whether there was a "Rush to judge Rush Limbaugh" both received over 60 comments. Both of those have a national audience to be sure, but local topics also have done well.
The upshot is that this vehicle has helped to introduce new readers to the Ed Cetera blog, which has always had smart content but not too much commenting. Now the readers are coming back--and commenting.
Here's a couple of important things we've done to promote Civil Disagreement:
Pick hot, breaking topics off the news and post as soon as possible. This increases the chances that the item will be placed on the home page as a stand-alone or hung in a breaking news package--which will give it more exposures to online Times readers.
Write smart and snarky op-eds to lure people in. Make sure to use all the principles of search engine optimization to get the op-ed picked up in Internet searches of people who might not visit the seattletimes.com otherwise.
Cross-promote. When we can, we promote Civil Disagreement in print with a short teaser at the bottom of the editorial page. The promo features both Ramsey's and Varner's photos with the most provocative 15 words from their arguments. This encourages our print readers to also wade online to see the expanded content we can't fit in the print edition.
Interact with commenters. Ramsey and Varner both try to get into the comment string to answer commenter questions, defend their arguments, or make new points. This helps to build a following for the feature.
Both Varner and Ramsey seem to be enjoying this interaction with each other and our readers. And, in this wild and woolly world of anonymous and often uncivil global commenting, they are modeling ways to civilly disagree with their smart and tart writing to boot.
Interesting, but we've had a couple of complaints from readers who want the feature in the paper, not online. If only we had room! But this leads me to think Civil Disagreement could well be adapted to print on the right issues--such as major ballot measures.
Kate Riley is associate editorial page editor/ online at The Seattle Times. Email kriley@seattletimes.com
FEED