more on Washington Post.Blog Editors Turne Off Comments due to nastiness

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: chodge5 () utk edu
Date: January 25, 2006 8:23:32 AM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Washington Post.Blog Editors Turne Off Comments due  
to nastiness


This was the subject of an interesting exchange between the editor of
washingtonpost.com, Jim Brady, and Xeni Jardin, from boingboing and  
Wired.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june06/post_1-24.html
(Audio and video of the segment are both available, but I think only the
audio is linked from the story page. For the video, you may have to  
go out
and browse available videos.)

-c

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, David Farber wrote:

> Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:15:57 -0500
> From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> To: ip () v2 listbox com
> Subject: [IP] Washington Post.Blog Editors Turne Off Comments due  
> to nastiness
>
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Alice Kehoe <a.kehoe2 () verizon net>
> Date: January 23, 2006 7:41:30 PM EST
>
> http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/2006/01/
> shutting_off_co.html
>
>
> Comments Turned Off
>
> As of 4:15 p.m. ET today, we have shut off comments on this blog
> indefinitely.
>
> At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue
> about this site, the events of the day, the journalism of The
> Washington Post Company and other related issues. Among the things
> that we knew would be part of that discussion would be the news and
> opinion coming from the pages of The Washington Post and
> washingtonpost.com. We knew a lot of that discussion would be
> critical in nature. And we were fine with that. Great journalism
> companies need feedback from readers to stay sharp.
>
> But there are things that we said we would not allow, including
> personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a
> significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused
> to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to
> allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to
> this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web
> culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able
> to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people
> feel strongly (and differently) about.
>
> We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public
> dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to
> think more carefully about how we do it. Any thoughtful feedback on
> that (or any other issue) is welcome, and you can send it to
> executive.editor () washingtonpost com.
>
> Thanks,
> Jim Brady
> Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com
>
>
> UPDATE, 7 p.m.: As you might expect, we're getting a ton of e-mail on
> this, and while I can't answer those e-mails individually, I'll
> address the two main points being made, that 1) we're afraid of being
> criticized and, 2) that were no personal attacks, profanity or hate
> speech in any of the comments.
>
> On the first point, washingtonpost.com has done an awful lot to be as
> transparent as possible. We've started a ton of blogs, we've linked
> out to bloggers who are writing (often negatively) about Post content
> and we've made journalists from The Post and post.com available to
> answer questions online on a daily basis. So I find it hard to make a
> case that we're unwilling to be criticized. What we're not willing to
> do is allow the comments area to turn into a place where it's OK to
> unleash vicious, name-calling attacks on anyone, whether they are
> Post reporters, public figures or other commenters. And that's
> exactly what was happening. That leads into the second complaint. The
> reason that people were not routinely seeing the problematic posts I
> mentioned were that we were trying to remove them as fast as we could
> in order to preserve the reasoned arguments many others were making.
> We removed hundreds of these posts over the past few days, and it was
> becoming a significant burden on us to try and keep the comments area
> free of profanity and name-calling. So we eventually chose to turn
> off comments until we can come up with a better way to handle
> situations like this, where we have a significant amount of people
> who refuse to abide by the rules we set out.
>
>
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