Learning to love website comments

(Note: The material in this post came in part from a staff editorial I wrote for the Barometer in November 2009)

As managing editor of the Barometer, one of my responsibilities was to moderate comments on our website. Through College Publisher, comments can be submitted, but won’t be posted to a story until an administrator approves them. This means reading through every word of each comment and deciding if they were too offensive, off-topic or nonsensical to approve.

This ultimately depressing and tedious duty was my happy privilege for more than six months. It was depressing because, while the Barometer is easily the most-consumed student media venue on campus, it has its fair share of haters (when working at a daily newspaper, you quickly discover that the loudest voices are those of the people who hate your coverage — the ones who like it rarely speak up).

There are certain people who I got to know by name or e-mail address because they would literally wait until each night around 11 when the Barometer would be published online, read every article, and rip each story and its author a new one via comment. However, these comments were usually well-written and totally appropriate, so I had to approve them.

The work of moderating comments can be a privilege and the bane of our existence. The democratic principles of newspapers can take their purest form in article comments. It’s wonderful to know what the audience is concerned with and talking about, and sometimes the conversation is lively, informative and engaging. If article comments will keep newspapers in business, at least online, then they’re irreplaceable. As Mike McInally, editor and publisher of the Gazette-Times, pointed out, those who comment on stories sometimes drop important news tips. But they can also be a source of serious frustration.

In keeping pace with the democratic traditions that newspaper people hold dear, we generally like the concept of article comments. News outlets are meant to serve the community and to allow for conversation. There is no better new media example of participation in a public forum than this. However, many of us feel more reverence to good old-fashioned letters to the editor. They tend to be more conceptually mature, articulate and actually make a discernible argument. At the Barometer, they are limited to 300 words, can be included in the daily print edition and, best of all, include the person’s name and contact information, so they’re held accountable for their response.

Article comments on newspaper websites were designed to be an open, constructive method of encouraging community and reader feedback and allowing the reader to interact with the newspaper and its audience. They allow readers to have a voice, to let us know what they appreciate and what didn’t work. Unfortunately, this privilege gets abused frequently. Because the comments allow for anonymity, some people feel free to post vulgar, offensive and sometimes threatening responses because they can’t be held responsible for their views or their lambasting.

Sometimes, newspapers are forced to disable comments on certain stories because they know that they will be inflammatory and offensive. While habitual posters may kick and scream because they feel that their right to democracy is being jeopardized, some stories simply speak for themselves. At a workshop with Steve Bagwell’s copy editing class last Wednesday, McInally said that the Gazette-Times disables comments on stories involving race or sexual abuse charges, because the comments can quickly degrade into predictable, offensive swill.

As moderators, we’re constantly on the lookout for not only spammers, but for “trolls” as well – people who post controversial and generally off-topic responses to articles to elicit a response from other readers. And while there are the occasional heart-warming posts commending a writer for their reporting, most of these comments are knee-jerk reactions to a detail of the story that the reader didn’t like.

But I can’t write this post in good conscience without mentioning the silent savior, the shining star of Barometer website comments. There is one particular reader (he or she goes by the free text reader name “Anon”) who could write article comments for a living, if such a job existed. Anon’s e-mail address remained the same each time, and on more than one occasion I considered writing to him/her (this person is definitely a him in my mind, so I’ll stick with that) just to find out who he was and offer my appreciation. Even if he disagrees with something the Barometer has published, he is articulate, polite and informed. Instead of arguing, he offers his point of view — which is always brilliant and makes me wonder why he follows dailybarometer.com so closely in the first place.

Hats off to you, Anon. Thanks for keeping it real on the Baro website.

While some news outlets have probably suffered enough abuse that they’ve had to disable all comments, at this point it’s a venue that people are so used to that it doesn’t make sense to take it away. If it keeps democratic traditions alive in news media outlets, it’s a necessary evil.

And, as always, don’t feed the trolls.