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Experiment in participatory journalism not working out so well for GateHouse papers
By adamg on Tue, 02/05/2008 - 3:41pm
The Cambridge Chronicle has shut down comments on articles, following the lead of the Somerville Journal, which shut off coments after trolls poisoned stories about a baby and a crossing guard, and the Swampscott Reporter, which found itself deluged with hate comments about the local Little League.
David Harris at the Chronicle writes:
Unfortunately, we have shut down all comments on our Web site after months of commenters getting a little out of control. If you’re keeping score, we have been shutting down comments for all stories that involve crime, race, religion and other sensitive areas that could make one ignorant person go a little haywire. But these stories only involve a little piece of potentially inflammatory stories. In the meantime until we find a solution, you can still comment on our blog.
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Comments
Why is GateHouse having so much trouble with this?
I'm one of the four moderators of Davis Square LiveJournal, a very lively forum covering not just Davis Square but also the rest of Somerville and even nearby North Cambridge.
I've been co-moderating it for about the past six months. We've only had to delete about eight posts during that time. Most of those deletions were for failing to follow our rules (especially the one about "hav[ing] something to do with Davis Square or the immediately surrounding areas"). I can remember only one post ever deleted for abusive behavior, and I don't think we've ever had to delete comments because of abusiveness.
GateHouse needs to try harder.
They need better tools
From Kat Powers's earlier comments, sounds like it's near impossible for editors to prune threads, block IP numbers, etc., etc. That's a lot more important for a completely open system run by a newspaper than a sort of semi-secret system like LiveJournal (yes, yes, anybody can get a LiveJournal account, but it's still not the same as a local newspaper). Look at the comments that show up all the time on the Herald.
Moderation
We moderate comments on our many blogs with little difficulty. The challenge has been moderating comments on hundreds and hundreds of stories. Problem comments often show up in totally unexpected places: birth announcements, school sports stories, church notes, calendars, etc. We are working on a solution.
Seriously?
Everyone knows you can't comment on LiveJournal unless you have a LiveJournal account, which not everyone has. (And now some LiveJournal accounts cost money. Remember when LiveJournal was actually cool and didn't charge any money at all and all their accounts were free?)
Most newspaper sites don't require you to login or create an account, so it's harder to track and moderate.
It's like comparing apples and oranges...
LiveJournal accounts are free
and anyone can get one easily. Yes, you can pay them and get additional features, but nobody has to do that. My account is free, and it still lets me co-moderate a community.
Some LiveJournal communities allow totally anonymous commenting. We decided to disallow it in ours. We still have pseudonymity; nobody has to post under their real name (though I choose to do so).
In my experience, this model works well, and newspaper sites should be able to implement something similar.
Good!
There is no way that comments should be allowed on a legitimate news site - if you want to discuss the news, use something like newsvine. John Q reader doesn't care about your opinion on article X or Y. A possible alternative might also be for the paper to run a forum on a separate page so the casual reader doesn't need to hear the usual leftist bleeding heart crap from some unemployed bike riding putz from East Cambridge.
Community news is about as a good an idea as community bathrooms - most of them don't work right, and they all smell like crap after awhile.
Remember kids, freedoom of the press doesn't include your right to be a public ass. If it did, I'd already own the patent. ;)
Unfortunate all around
I am, personally, breathing a sigh of relief that the comments are gone, and I feel very bad about that. I wish it didn't have to be this solution. I'd much rather have the comments turned on, but not on the same page as the article. If you had to click to see them, I could read articles online without having depressingly vitriolic, insulting and/or content-free comments just below my line of sight - very difficult to ignore. Wading through the muck to read the potential important public discussion is an honorable endeavor, but I want to be able to choose when I do it.