No comment, please, thank you, no comment, no...
There
was no video or audio, because the judge in juvenile court decided it
was better to sentence the 16-year-old girl who killed her father
without pictures and sound. I covered the story as I had other court
stories for years.
It was one of those stories, that after you were through, your stomach hurt. I should have taken time to ask myself: "Could that story turn into an interactive nightmare?"
Newspapers all over the country have been debating how they use reader comments, including at the New York Times, which edits them.
The
tragic story of abuse inside a Wichita family that led to a teenage
girl shooting her father to death pointed out why we should think about
them.
We were busy working on the next day’s news cycle, when the girl’s lawyer, Laura Shaneyfelt,
called and asked if we’d been reading the reader comments on the story.
They started out with comments from what looked like regular readers.
The story was shocking enough. But as the morning turned to afternoon,
personal comments began to emerge. Although we had never named the
juvenile girl, her name suddenly popped up.
Then someone blamed the slain father’s mother, by name. It was apparent that a family feud had fired up on-line at Kansas.com.
We
shut the comments down. I soon received a call from a woman who said
she’d tried to find the comments, after someone told her about them,
and couldn’t find them. I told her they’d gotten out of hand and we
needed to eliminate them and stop the discussion.
“Thank you,” she said.
Other crime stories have drawn racist remarks on our pages.
We’ve been told that legally if you edit individual comments you can limit your defense should a bad one slip through.
We
have issue similar to reporters at other paper I talk to: you can write
a story about quilting and someone, somewhere will eventually leave a
comment about how quilting promotes illegal immigration. What are you
going to do?
Some problems, however, we can
head off before they start. We now have the option of clicking a “no
comments” box before sending our stories to the desk. I thought that
was a box to signify we’d tried to talk to a cantankerous politician.
I’ve been assured it removes the opportunity for controversial comments
from readers.
We now have a list of stories we should consider in checking that box, including stories that name victims or defendants.
We
also check the box on stories “likely to produce ribald comments,”
although as I tell our editors, those are my personal favorites.
As
we tackle the large learning curves of melding layers of our coverage
with audio and video, we should also remember to read the comments on
our stories each day.
I’d be interested in hearing what other papers are doing.
To do that, well, leave a comment.
4 comments:
Mindy McAdams
said...
Great
post, Ron. When I was in Wichita, I heard a reporter from a different
newspaper talking about how reader comments had gotten out of control
on a story she had written about gentrification in a particular
neighborhood. At first I thought maybe she was being over-sensitive --
you know, journalists are not used to hearing the audience talk back.
But as she provided more details, I learned about things I had never
thought about before.
In her case, the readers who had
"gentrified" the neighborhood were angry about the story. So they
started to post personal attacks against the reporter. They called her
names. They claimed she had fabricated information (she had not). They
accused her of personal bias.
While it was clear, as I listened
to her, that she felt personally hurt by the comments, it was also
clear that it was not a case of a journalist having a thin skin -- or a
big ego. The kinds of comments she described were unfair as well as
untrue.
Now, maybe the best course of action in that case would
be for her to go in and provide the true information, to counteract the
inaccuracies in the comments. But that would take a lot of time -- time
she could be spending on the next story.
Ryan
said...
We
just (finally) turned on a bare-bones commenting system a couple weeks
ago, and I've got a checkbox to manually turn comments on when it's
appropriate.
My basic checklist: Dead kid? No comments. Rape? No
comments. Immigration story? If it's editorial or analysis, let 'em
have at it, but if it's a news story about individuals or particular
ethnic groups, no comments.
It's also good to know your online
readers - do you recognize the trolls from the paper's forums or blogs?
Keep an eye on their comments, and if things go off-topic in a mean
way, consider shutting them down.
Another little phenomenon that
could make a good research paper for someone else: The more public the
comments are, the cleaner they stay.
For example, while the
forums might be a mudpit, the blogs are one step above that, and the
comments on news stories seem to magically regulate themselves - people
are just plain nicer in public.
Carlos
said...
We've
been allowing comments on our news stories and editorials for about 3
months now. We never announced the function but they really took off
nevertheless. I'm in charge of monitoring the comments. And even though
we have had some profanity and some personal attacks against people in
the stories (one in particular about a father charged with kidnapping
his children) I would say that those types of comments have made up
less the 1% of the comments. I've had to delete maybe 8 comments so
far. Our basic criteria is: no profanity, no libel, no personal
attacks. Even though there have been a number of veiled racist comments
(on immigration stories, of course) we have allowed those to stay and
we have seen other readers calling them out for such remarks. All in
all, the comments have been popular. Granted I work at a paper in a
small Washington town with a small readership, so I am able to monitor
the comments pretty easily throughout the day.
Will
said...
We
have an ongoing project documenting the lives of each homicide victim
in our community. It seems to violate your 'rules' for allowing
comments, but knock on wood, so far the discussion has remained
thoughtful and civil.
It doesn't get tons of posts - it's been
up since the start of the year and has maybe 40-50 comments. But we
haven't had to deal with any problems. Of course now I've probably
jinxed myself :)
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/notforgotten
-will