Rude reporters, crude news judgment and anonymous opinions are regular criticisms filed over the course of my workday. So I was struck by the irony of the newsroom reaction to a relatively new service that allows readers to post comments about stories on The Courant’s websites. Some on the news staff worried that rude, crude and anonymous readers would abuse the service — and them.
Of course, some have. But none as notorious as readers who bombarded the Sun-Sentinel in Florida with hateful, racist comments in response to several published articles. Also legendary is the barrage of venomous comments directed at the blog of Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, which led washingtonpost.com to temporarily shut down the service. Just the idea that any reader could post unedited, unverified, unidentified comments under The Courant’s banner — well, it just didn’t sit well.
Despite the angst, which lingers four months after the launch of the service, the forums on The Courant’s websites are alive and growing, with 6,500 discussion threads generated so far.
At the end of articles, blogs and reviews, readers largely have free rein.
At times, the discourse is insightful, but often enough, discussions slide into standard corner-bar fare, with name-calling and all.
So what is to be gained by all this freewheeling discourse? For news organizations, more online traffic. For some readers, a new place to socialize. For some journalists, more criticism.
Before the introduction of the forums, which are administered by Topix.net, a lot of the chatter surrounding Courant stories ended up in my mailbox. It took a few months, but after developing a thick skin, I learned to ignore the basest comments in order to deliver to the staff the comments I thought were most constructive.
Now, however, much of the civility of online conversations depends on readers policing themselves. Topix.net and The Courant also attempt to keep things civil in these ways:
All posts pass through an automated filter.
Posts that contain certain offensive words are killed outright, although it is easy to evade the filter with creative spelling.
The filter also looks for “heated language.” Posts that have a high proportion of heated language are killed. Heated language is defined as profanity that is milder than the banned-word list and words that could indicate malicious intent, such as “hate,” “kill,” “murder,” “rape,” etc.
The filter also detects sensitive items, such as Social Security numbers and phone numbers, and deletes posts in which they appear.
The filter also deletes duplicated comments to prevent spamming.
A user who finds a post offensive can click a “Flag for Review” link that brings the post to the attention of a site administrator, who can decide whether to allow it.
But there are hundreds of opportunities a day for readers to offer their two cents about thousands of issues and stories. Monitoring the volume is simply impossible.
Some say these forums represent the lowest common denominator in public discourse. Others worry that allowing unproductive, unsubstantiated chatter to be associated with responsible news organizations threatens the mission of journalism.
I think the readers who matter are sophisticated enough to distinguish between idle chatter and responsible reporting.
