September 04, 2009
Hot Dish on Facebook engages young users with news
A NewsCloud experiment suggest young people will participate in and contribute to a news and information community that goes where they live and share
I find encouraging news in a new report about an experiment designed to engage young people in environmental news by putting it on Facebook.
As I noted in April, NewsCloud‘s Jeff Reifman created an application that enabled development on Facebook of a site called Hot Dish from the environmental news site Grist and a site called The Daily on Facebook, the student news organization at the University of Minnesota last spring. Each was designed specifically to engage young users on a social network they frequent. The two-month experiments were funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. (Disclosure: I do consulting for Knight on unrelated projects.)
University of Minnesota reasearcher Christine Greenhow studied the experiments and her new report on the Hot Dish project is very promising. (The Minnesota Daily report comes out later this month.) The Hot Dish site had about 2,000 registered users and 346 agreed to be part of the research project.
Greenhow surveyed that group and found that they did engage with the site.
Significantly, Greenhow reports, “Interest in Hot Dish’s focal topic (environment and climate change) increased, especially among low users. Anecdotal evidence also suggested growth in environmental knowledge… The biggest increase in interest occurred within the low user profile.”
The application also invited users to join an Action Team, earn points by meeting specific challenges. “...the two most performed challenges were taking
action online through media production (e.g., sharing a story, posting a blog entry, creating a video, sharing your thoughts/ideas in comments, tweets, chats, etc.) and activism in the local community (e.g. volunteering, composting, taking part in an environmental event, recycling, etc.) The competition and incentives including prizes created a highly engaged group participants, the report says.
The focus on a particular topic and its social netork design also may have encouraged engagement. For example nearly three-quarters of the group surveyed said they wanted to use the site to interact with like-minded people, compared to about a third who said they would seek that interaction on a general news site. Similarly, about two thirds of those surveyed said they were motivated to use the site to express their opionion, compared to about 40 percent who said they would use a general news site to do that. Reifman told me Hot Dish never had to take down a single comment because it was offensive.
The report said finding young people where they already read, write and exchange views. The “results suggests there may be advantages to locating niche media-sharing communities within existing social networks.”
Users contributed more than two-thirds of the content of the site during the two-month experiment, actively writing, commenting and sharing. More than 1500 stories were posted, 4500 stories shared, and 2350 comments written. More than 20,000 challenges for the competition were completed.
Wow. Young people engage with news and become more interested in it. That’s a headline. Many questions must still be answered but this is encouraging. I have long believed that the blame for disengagement of young people from mainstream media list with us, the journalists, not with the young people, who often engage in civic activities that fly under our radar. This suggests a path to new practices that can bring young users and news together.
Exploring innovation, transformation and leadership in a new ecosystem of news, by journalist and change advocate 
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