From a recent column by Executive Editor Calvin Stovall in the Press & Sun-Bulletin of Binghamton, N.Y.:
When we began using technology to allow people to post comments, we eagerly anticipated people participating in meaningful community dialogue about important issues, making suggestions on improving our community, congratulating one another on accomplishments and milestones.
Editors were not naïve enough to think that everyone would behave civilly on our websites. But few of us thought people could be as mean as they are. Yes, in hindsight, some would argue that we perhaps made a mistake by not requiring people to sign up for the site using their real names and providing some form of verification. Still, people should be humane. Anonymity is no excuse for incivility.
Stovall did not suggest a fail-safe solution: Discontinuing comments for good. Is that a step Gannett should take? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
32 comments:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
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No. It's not a good idea, and it's naive of him to believe that people would be nice. They should have planned some kind of system to monitor the comments way before they allowed them. Typical Gannett, though, to do something without thinking it through.
ReplyDeletePeoples commenting on ANY new websites are a complete waste of time. Their worthless, mean spirited, vile, ignorant, biggoted, racist, and just plain stupid!!! CNN Headline news has become unwatchable during the day because the hosts are constantly carping for viewers to email or phone in their comments to news stories. This is NOT news... its garbage!
ReplyDeleteI receive a lot of just plain vile reader comments via E-mail, but try to send a reply to everyone who takes the time to contact me. It is hard, especially because some people just seem to want to find fault with everything, itching for a fight. Still, one of the first lessons I was taught in journalism was that people think of newspapers as part of their community, and deserve a response if they take the time to call or write.
ReplyDeleteI would put the commenter who said "typical Gannett..." in the category of one of the cranky readers who deserves a polite "thank you for writing" reply. I am unaware of any newspaper that has found a way of bringing civility to public comment, and don't see this as a Gannett-does-it-wrong issue.
Once again, they did things on the cheap, and now have to pay the consequences.
ReplyDeleteHey, let's allow the general public to comment on all our news stories, and that will give readers something to read. Won't cost us anything....(year later)....Whoa, you see what people are posting? We need to assign the copy desk to monitor the postings and kill out the bad stuff...(year later)......Whoa, no copy desk. Laid off the grayhairs....
Those posting online comments on the Gannett websites should be required to use their real names. Boom. Problem solved.
ReplyDeleteI know at my site, it's all about the clicks. We've become click whores, and if it takes posting nauseating photo after photo of scantily clad drunks in the town's bars, or letting racists post their comments on stories with Hispanic names, we're all for it. The Web gurus even post the stories so one must click to get to the next page! What?! The stories can't run in full length on the Web? Run outa room?
ReplyDeleteThat way they can tell the advertisers, see, we get this many clicks a day on our website!
I'm not saying it's right, by any means, but that's the way she rolls.
12:46 You can phony your name with no problem. Note the story says the newspaper knocked off some posters, only to see them come back under other names. Blocking the IP for lifetime of abusive posters might be useful. But this is all time, money and angst with dealing with angry readers accusing them of political motives for not running their stuff. Other newspapers seem to be tolerant of a lot of abuse, and I note the Washington Post allows an awful lot of crap.
ReplyDeleteYou allow vox pop. and you get it in spades. You can phony up the IP as well. There are a whole generation of angry trolls out there who do nothing all day long but try to start flame wars. I am involved in an Internet contest that requires us to unravel a riddle and give an accurate reply to win prizes. The trolls have tried to trash this contest by planting phony information on Wikipedia, which is one of the sources used to unravel the riddle. As reporters already know (some to their regret), anyone can rewrite a Wikipedia article with whatever misinformation he wants to put in there.
ReplyDeleteThere are trolls, yes. But that's not the only problem. People have had these vicious, vile thoughts in their heads for years. But they generally haven't been dumb enough to say them out loud in public for the fear of the consequences. Anonymous internet posting has removed consequences. It's creating a culture where nobody is held accountable for their actions. In a lot of ways its just that simple - and wrong.
ReplyDeleteJust do what reddit does. They have a community that handles thousands more comments than newspapers and it's million times more effective at creating better discussions.
ReplyDeletemy oberservation is that The Guardian does a wonderful job in the comment monitoring area.
ReplyDeleteI find 12:23's comment humorous and ironic. Unless you meant it tongue in cheek. But if you didn't...why are YOU posting?
ReplyDeleteAnd also, not knowing that civility disappears with internet anonymity shows that Gannett's strategy of putting paper-and-ink people in charge of things on the digital side is a bad idea in general. How many of you see comments sections on other sites and see the digital zoo they are? What made Binghamton think they would be different? other than perhaps their naive thoughts about "the interwebz"?
At USA Today, senior editors should not have been surprised -- to the extent they even were -- when comments were replete with racist, politically partisan, and downright vicious language, after the paper began publishing them on stories around 2006.
ReplyDeleteI served on a committee advising editors before the paper began allowing reader comments. Until that point, USAT had only allowed comments on staff blogs -- and only after they'd been first read and approved by a staffer; readers could not publish them on their own.
I recall that one of our committee's big worries, which we communicated in our report, is that many comments would, indeed, turn ugly, and so would devalue the quality of USAT's website.
Today, it strikes me that comments are the one area where newspapers substantially deviate from print standards. For example, racist comments posted by readers hiding behind made-up pseudonyms would never be published in print. On the other hand, stories and other information published online are expected to adhere to print standards, including accuracy, impartiality and inflammatory speech.
Why is there an exception for comments?
I have read comments on enough sites to realize that there are a lot of trolls out there who turn any topic to their own agenda. Sometimes the hate really astounds me.
ReplyDeleteIf the comments are not monitored, they will succeed. If you're going to have comments, which serve the same function online as letters to the editor in print, which require verifiable contact information to be printed, you need to lay the ground rules and police them for civility. Failure to remove uncivil posts constitutes an approval of those posts.
Unfortunately, the difficulty with requiring personal information with the posts is the inability to keep that information private as needed. It's far too easy to locate someone who posts a comment you don't like than it used to be.
I'm all for protecting free speech, but I'm also concerned with protecting the free speaker.
Someone already gave the answer, Jim: the clicks and page views are bringing in money. Internet advertising rates give a premium to the length of time people stay on a site. These days it is considered a good site if the average time people spend on the site is more than five minutes. It doesn't differentiate if they are reading stories, looking at the funnies, or pounding out a screed to counter someone else's comments. It is all money in Gannett's pockets. Policing the comments properly would require assigning staff, which in return would reduce profits.
ReplyDeleteWe have sold our soul to the devil. There used to be a day _ really not long ago _ when newspapers maintained community standards.
The comments on the app.com site are vile. I've complained to the EE to monitor the site better or take down the comment area.
ReplyDeleteIt's really not that hard to figure out. There are a lot of very angry people walking these days and commenting on stories and posting in forums are a way to vent that anger without being noticed publically. It's as natural as watching a wreck on the highway.
ReplyDeleteI know people that use APP.com to read the comments for entertainment. They really don't care about the journalism! They might read the story but the draw for them is the comments. If it is all about the clicks how, as a part of your business model, could you get rid of the garbage being posted there?
ReplyDeleteI said this before and I'll say it again. I lost sources because of attack type story comments that were allowed to linger for way too long. Unfortunately, sources and the public view the reporters and the entire staff as tolerate of hateful remarks when they're allowed on the comment sites. Clicks or not, I think Gannett should shut the comments down right now since it appears that nobody takes responsibility for monitoring them 24/7.
ReplyDeleteGannett should use one or two newspapers as a beta to decide what would happen if the standard for comments was the same as the standard for having a comment published in the the print edition of the paper.
ReplyDeleteI remember the eagerness and optimism that was washington over the USAT operation when the comment-on-every-story program was launched. And at first we all had some hope ... intelligent people posted meaningful comments and the site was awarded a major national award for its efforts. But shortly thereafter the haters, bigots, homophobes and despots took over, drowning out the real folks. And now that's all that's left.
ReplyDeleteA pitty really.
I don't think we should condemn and restrict these comments on stories. At least, they show people are reading our newspaper these days and have an interest in our stories. Yes, there are troglodytes in our midst, and they obviously hold political views far from the fabled 50-yard line where American politics are supposed to be fought. But the other side has its say, and I say let the readers hammer it out as they are doing. It's healthy not to stomp on other people's views, and I think it is democracy in action with all the mess and revulsion that entails. If you don't like the comments, don't read them. Or, better yet, buy the dead tree version and you won't see them.
ReplyDelete*ALL* comments are negative, and most are off-topic rants. Check out this innocuous story about three girls trick-or-treating that attracted 82 comments. It got ugly quick. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=201011010325
ReplyDeleteI'm embarrassed to work for an organization that allows this sort of thing to appear on its website every day. It detracts from the reporting and adds nothing.
The remarks on app.com are so bad that I stop reading the paper on line. Moderate them on take them down.
ReplyDeleteWe are leaving the comment section open too long. Take a look at what the NY Times does. It has a column this week by economist Paul Krugman "Mugged by the Moralizers" which remains the most read story in the paper although it was posted last weekend. It is red meat stuff, and was certain to get a response.
ReplyDeleteIt did, and the NYT closed comments after collecting about 450 in the first hour.
They picked 10 of those they thought were the best, and now only allow readers to recommend the comments they like.
Yes, it would require a staff input to do all this, but it seems a simple way of letting people comment, then shutting off debate before it gets out of hand. I've seen the NYT do this on other controversial stories, too.
Sounds to me like an old rant from old farts who don't like what the kids are doing. Lookie, Gannett missed the boat on Facebook and the idea of bringing people together on the Internet, and the only thing the newspapers have is the comments columns, where citizens can talk to one another.
ReplyDeleteMobile is going to require bringing people together even more. Hey, would you rather have it be some successor to Facebook, or the newspaper? Since the newspaper pays my wages, I would rather it be there.
So who really cares if they're nasty or what they say to one another? Do we monitor e-mail, Facebook or other new technologies to make sure the person-to-person meet our standards for proper and civil transactions. Of course we don't.
It's a new world. If we don't permit open conversations and comments, people will move their discussions elsewhere. Do you really want that? Do you really want to sit there in silence nursing your great story that no one is reading?
7:21, I slightly disagree... in that I think we have two types of readers. Ones who actually read the articles and digest the information and others who just quickly scan only to spend hours turning your well written story into a vile, racist reactionary Jerry Springer show. We may say it allows people to have a voice, however the comments directly reflect on the individual paper allowing and 'printing' them online. If we stop allowing comments, the people who only like to comment may move on however the readers who actually READ will stay and feel like we have elevated our site that shows progress rather than regress.
ReplyDeleteThe most important points in this discussion are these: 1. We get eyeballs and revenues from this crap. 2. It's offensive beyond newspaper standards of decency and hurts people. I'd add this: It destroys the credibility of the paper, which ultimately destroys revenues. I favor chat standards similar to letters to the editor. We got lots of those. Online, it's just easier and faster.
ReplyDeleteWorth noting: Here on Gannett Blog, the posts with the most comments get the most pageviews. In other words, you come to this site, first and foremost, to read the comments.
ReplyDeleteThat's why the single most-viewed item (other than the homepage) day after day is the Real Time Comments open forum post at the very top of the homepage.
My job is to post news and other items that keep the discussion rolling.
Also take into account these clicks on our sites give bragging rights to the suits when they meet. Corporate (particularly Dickey) is pressuring these guys to get hip to the digital age, and the clicks provide the evidence they are already doing that. Big bucks and bonuses are riding on these click figures.
ReplyDeleteOne disgusting Anti Obama Troll always gets the highest "Recommended" hits and ends up being the first blog post to show up (if you change the drop down preferences to 'most recommended'). The bloggers even brag about how to get the top spot....remove your computer's USAT cookie then click 'Recommended," then repeat, for as many times you wish.
ReplyDelete5:33 is onto something. I don't have the statistics to back this up, but I do get the impression that the longer comments are left open, the more the crazies pile in.
ReplyDelete