Two weeks ago I covered a heated panel discussion about the comments on The Times-Picayune’s website.
Via Jim Romenesko’s blog at the Poynter Institute today comes news of a link to a Wisconsin daily’s decision to stop comments on stories “that involve crimes, courts, accidents, race or sex.”
“The nastiness,” in the comments on those stories, writes Jim Angus, the paper’s editor, “is too much.”
“We’re not the only newspaper struggling with the issue” Angus writes. “Papers around the country are assessing comments and implementing or looking for ways to make conversations on their websites more civil.”
It’s one way of tackling the issue. Although I think these issues are important, and would favor getting people to have their identity verified in order to comment. It should be about accountability, not closing down difficult discussions.
The problem with the verification systems is that anyone can get an email address in a matter of seconds. See, for instance, http://www.mailinator.com/ Any verification beyond that is too complicated and itself would stifle discussion by everyone except the most opinionated.
A newspaper is under no obligation to host comments, so should be able to close comments on particular posts or not have them at all. Most local newspapers kind of suck, but are increasingly NOT the only forum for discussion of community issues. Let the racists and crazies get a blog.
Letters to the editor are verified with a call to the person. I’m suggesting that level of effort to verify the identity of commenters at a daily. Yes, more effort and expense, but at the same time it raises the value of the comments. You create a valuable dialog instead of one that most people choose to disregard.
Sorry, but I have precious little sympathy. For generations, newspapers encouraged the harvesting of concentrated insanity with “Letters to the Editor” columns. When the paper itself was the only outlet, the editor cherrypicked the best of the craziness, partly for mockery of the readership and partly to encourage more demonstrations that American newspaper readers were functionally illiterate. Now the assumption is that the only way to get people to visit daily paper sites is by opening up forums, and then the editors look surprised when those same nutjobs defecate all over them. They’ve spent decades and even centuries promising a dialogue, and now they’ve discovered firsthand that offering one is like french-kissing a Tasmanian devil.
Personally, I encourage editors and writers to open dialogues with their readers. The comments in newspaper forums, though, aren’t dialogues. They’re vowel movements. These editors have moved into customer service, and they’re discovering what any customer service representative in the US could tell you. Namely, generations of illiteracy, ignorance, and absolutely insane entitlement produce hour upon hour of valid arguments to nuke most of the country into horizon-to-horizon vistas of radioactive green glass. Editors shouldn’t be encouraging these “readers”. They should be doing everything they can to move them to better venues, like measuring the maximum gap between the seventh and eighth fingers on each hand or selecting a high school fight song that isn’t “Dueling Banjos”.