Annotated Bibliography
COMU2020
Maxwell Allan
41393460
Lisa Gunders

Santana, A. (2011) Online Readers Comments Represent New Opinion Pipeline. Newspaper Research Journal, 32 (3), 66 – 8. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/socscijournals/docview/906020768/1401FC2C51513C8E038/8?accountid=14723
This article attempts to uncover whether comment sections of online newspapers are actually used for any benefit to the journalists or whether they are in fact only highly emotional and socially destructive comments made in anonymity as attacks. This article shows through online surveys of journalists that there is at least some use of user comments in contributing to news story editing decisions and ideas for new stories to most journalists. 150 of Americas top news papers were approached with interviews of over 400 journalists.
This paper is from 2011 which makes it relevant for contemporary research. The article is from Newspaper Research Journal which seems to be a credible source. This provides insight to what journalists actually think about most comments in these sections and how they contribute to ongoing research into usefulness and manner of online comments of news events.

Bowman, S. Willis, C. (2003). Introduction to Participatory Journalism. In We Media. (pp. 7 -14) The American Press Institute. Stanford, California.
This chapter provides an overview of online webblogging and general online commentary about news media. This chapter is important because it brings to light many ideas about the emergence of weblogging and how this can help to assist the progression and evolution of journalism. It states that rather than diminish the need for need for traditional journalism, it provides an equal and different mode of information. Where traditional journalism is about many stories being submitted and then good ones being published, online comment making is where many stories are published but only some are deemed to be of good quality and are “followed” by more users and given positive feedback to encourage more readers to pay attention to them.
This chapter is in a book which is aimed at academics because it is fully referenced but it is also aimed at non academics and is written in a less scholarly style. It is very helpful and insightful but is written more like a news article.

Bowman, S. Willis, C. (2003). Potential Benefits of We Media. In We Media. (pp 53 - 58). The American Press Institute. Stanford, California.
This chapter aims to show what the main benefits are of newspapers and news media outlets paying attention to and encouraging online commenting. This source is from the same book as the Introduction to Particapatory Journalism and will have the same biases, strengths and weaknesses as well as audiences. This chapter though is good because it fleshes out ideas about the future of interactivity and ideas for future study and research. This will be an important part of the report which will eventually be completed from this biblograph

Nip, J. Y. M. (2007) Exploring the Second Phase of Public Journalism. Journalism Studies 7(2), 212 – 236. doi: 10.1080/14616700500533528
This article is a scholarly and is aimed at an academic audience as it is from the newspaper research journal. It is from 2011 and because of this provides an up to date account of interactivity in media. This article focuses mainly on the usefulness of reader comments on online news articles and assesses the usefulness of some of the comments in a context of highly emotional and radical comments.
This article is important in identifying the issues around interactivity and what sort of comments are likely to appear in these sections. As this can often be problematic, this raises some of the issues found and opinions on why this is not useful to news media going forward.
McCluskey, M. &