The final speaker at ECREA 2014 is Veera Kangaspunta, who notes the importance of studying the audience behind online news comments. Traditionally, journalists have seen online news as a sideshow to the real news business, and online comments are thus a sideshow to the sideshow – but this is changing. While the quality of online commentary is often limited, and discussions may drift, they may be studied to reveal a great deal more about audience attitudes.
Veera's case study is focussing on an environmental accident in Finland and its coverage across local and national newspapers. The accident has a very different meaning for the readers of these papers, of course; national attention (and comments on the national paper's site) dies down a great deal more quickly than in the regional sites whose readers are living near the affected areas.
And that's when my iPad battery ran out - sorry!
