Reporters question washingtonpost.com comments policy
Howard Kurtz on Washington Post reporters questioning whether site should keep online comments:
Since last summer, washingtonpost.com has allowed registered users to post comments on any news story. A recent report about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who said the slow recovery of his city was part of a plan to change its racial makeup and leadership, led to a number of offensive or inflammatory remarks:"Some Black politicians are [expletive] idiots." "IF a white MAN were to speak as you do, you'd look for a lynching party." One person described Nagin as a racist and a women's sanitary product.
Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says he does not have the resources to screen the roughly 2,000 daily comments in advance. He has one staffer deleting offensive comments after the fact, and banning the authors from further feedback, based on complaints from readers. Brady plans to devote more staff to the process and to use new filtering technology.
"The medium allows for readers and journalists to engage in conversation, and to say we're not going to take advantage of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me," he says. "I'd rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all."
But Post reporter Darryl Fears is among those in the newsroom who believe the comments should be junked if offensive postings can't be filtered out in advance. "If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he says. "You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."
After Post reporter Darragh Johnson wrote in February about a Northeast Washington teenager who was fatally shot while being chased by police, some readers posted comments, including racist comments, criticizing the boy. Johnson says the 17-year-old's father cited the comments in declining to answer most questions about his son.
What is spreading this Web pollution is the widespread practice of allowing posters to spew their venom anonymously. If people's full names were required -- even though some might resort to aliases -- it would go a long way toward cleaning up the neighborhood.
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Discussion
3 comments about 'Reporters question washingtonpost.com comments policy'A simple solution: Don't turn comments on for every single story. Add a checkbox next to the headline field in your content management system that says "Allow comments on this story?" and use the tiniest bit of discretion.
A simple guideline: Dead kid in the story? No comments. Public figure in the story? Comments are on.
The technical side of this is only slightly harder to handle than the philosophical side, which is sometimes called "editing."
Posted by Ryan at April 11, 2007 10:37 AM
Even simpler: enable flagging.
Posted by Curt at April 11, 2007 11:21 AM
I won't read your paper if censored. Selective comment sections is censorship.
Have an age-restricted page with an offensive material warning that lists all the words you deem offensive. If the poster uses one of these words in their comment, your software can shoot it down with ease. I can't find a commment section for the Sheehan candidacy so your on notice. Further offenses will result in looking elsewhare for news from papers that pro-actively foster free speech.
Posted by Tim at July 8, 2007 10:04 PM
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