Newspapers Agonize Over Allowing Comments

Seems that newspapers are frantically trying to cling to life, after having done all they can to cause their own death.

I stopped paying for the local paper some years ago, due to the hollow and unprofessional reporting, the left-wing bias, and the fact that the paper boy insisted upon delivering the rag to the deepest puddle on the driveway.

Newspapers, as relevant sources for information, are almost extinct. So are buggy whips. The difference is that buggy whip manufacturers understand this, and newspaper publishers don’t.

Blog comments, anonymous or not, are not much less relevant than the carefully screened letters to the editor. Newspapers with an agenda (are there any without?) will skew the letters to the editor by publishing more that favor the paper’s editorial position, and even deliberately publishing semi-illiterate letters which reflect poorly upon those in opposition to the paper’s editorial board.

Speaking of anonymity, how about the editorial boards which offer up commentaries with no attribution whatever? I’ve argued this with our local paper in the past. I was required to give my full name, street address, and valid local phone number in order to qualify for inclusion. But the editorial to which I was responding never had anyone’s name attached, not even the names of the shadowy editorial board, whatever that was.

My alias here is simply a reflection of my desire to avoid the nut bags like the one who once tracked me down after a letter to the editor was published, and called my house. My wife answered, and he scared her half to death, threatening all sorts of mayhem if I didn’t stop insulting his hero, Teddy Kennedy. That’s the truth. I’m not really a covert CIA operative, or a former member of Tony Soprano’s crew, now in the witness protection program.

Hi La Shawn and Readers,

My hometown weekly allows people to call in comments, and they’re pirnted on their own page.

Of course, I’m sure they don’t print EVERY comment, but they are still anonymous.

Next to the police log and the obituaries, it’s probably the most popular part of the paper.

Cheers,
Julie the Jarhead

Hi: I always enjoy your blog. I note this one point, “Newspapers supposedly operate under certain journalistic standards – unlike blogs – and if they wouldn’t allow anonymous letters to the editor or the use of anonymous sources for stories, they shouldn’t allow anonymous comments.”

The problem with newspapers is too much anonymity in their reporting – it reduces too much of what is said to gossip. What is important in evaluating our leaders is what they say on the record. All these anonymous sources are a distraction.

Hi, LaShawn. I read your blog at least three times a week, as time allows, and always enjoy your comments. I’m a 52 yoa, white, Christian, married 30 years, living in the inland West…Columbia basin. I’m a retired prosecutor, so I guess you’d call me educated!

My husband and I quit taking our local paper a year ago for the same reasons (except our paperboy was great) as Redbeard. However, after reading your blog entry “Newspapers Agonize Over Allowing Comments” I’m wondering if I shouldn’t rethink my position.

I don’t think it’s in the best interest of America to have our newspapers die out. Admittedly, newspapers fall alarmingly short of the ideal; but so do all human institutions. Newspapers now are not fallen from some previous standard of perfection. Think back to William Randolph Hearst, yellow journalism, etc. Newspapers historically have been variously aligned and proponents of political parties and political positions, and full of bad, biased reporting. It was the very proliferation of their various accounts that provided overall coverage of the facts. As a lawyer, I’m comfortable with the idea that an adversarial system, with each party promoting their own evidence, arrives at truth.

What’s different now? Now there is no national conservative newspaper; no rival for the New York Times “paper of record” designation. Why is this? Are we conservatives unwilling to put our money up? Or is it that the reporting entitities, mainstream media for lack of a better word, has become so overwhelmingly leftist and so bitterly vicious to other points of view that conservative media can’t compete? As much as I enjoy the blogosphere, and its many various forms, I believe there is a need for newspapers and a truly national source for news and comment in the “standard” journalists’ method.

I’m thinking now that I need to find a conservative newspaper and SUBSCRIBE. Pay my money down and support a MSM conservative paper. My father-in-law takes the Conservative Chronicle, and maybe I’ll choose it. Any ideas, LaShawn?

I think that the premise for comments makes no sense, if they are truly trying to boost anything.

I sought the web after losing interest in the MSM and the absolute negativity towards America and conservative values.

I doubt that I will ever rely on the MSM again.

I can’t think of any reason that comments would be effective one way or the other.

Newspapers sell ads to survive. If their readership is small, their ad revenue is small. They have not yet figured out how to get readership up so they can get their ad revenue up.

Hint: Try reporting the old fashioned way of covering the who, what, where, when and how. But reporters and their editors are consumed with “why” and “solution” reporting, which is essentially political view commentary masquerading as “just presenting the facts.”

Blogs are opinion experiences. It is very important that the blog princess has a high set of standards which she rigidly enforces. Most important to me are the blogs that include interaction between the commentators. I learn a great deal from the highly articulate and thoughtful individuals I encounter on LBC.

I used my name on another site and I got Googled and harassed by nasty phone calls. I may be dreaming, but it seems that liberal nut-jobs are particularly profane and unpleasant. Of course, I don’t have experience with conservatives harassing me for my views.

I have had many letters to the editor published in the Washington Post over the years, and every one of them was heavily edited. You agree to the editing, but you have no say in the finished product.

Newspapers and news weeklies are going to have to figure out a new plan of presentation if they are to survive. We really do need some enterprise to fund the very expensive business of gathering the news. LBC largely depends on the reporting efforts of others. While the internet has some terrific original reporting, nearly every blog on the net is a low budget operation compared to the large newspapers and news magazines.

Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin, Captain’s Quarters, LaShawn Barber’s Corner, Instapundit, Power Line and others have applied pressure to the MSM in ways that are beginning to make the old dinosaur press take notice. The more difference the competent blog sites make, the more howling and smearing you see on Huffington, KOS, and their ilk.

I am amazed at the stuff that commenters make on the WaPo blog site. But I think it serves a good purpose to let the public see the stupid remarks and the nastiness of some people. Mostly, I think the WaPo can grow and learn from a sounding board that is not necessarily populated by members of their comfort group. I think this is particularly important for local newspapers where the weekly give-aways are eating their lunch.

Why do newspapers have unsigned editorials? I know who the “Editor of the Editorial Pages” is from the paper’s masthead. Is it for plausible denial, so that said editor can say that an underling wrote it while they were on vacation visiting Pitcairn Island?

The old print media is stuck in a financial death spiral due to its own folly.

Little wonder that it would come up with a hit piece on the blog media then.

This is the same sort of tactic that caused the print media’s circulation to drop to all time lows in the first place.

Anonymous trolls and posters are a completely different problem that The Machine predicts will some day be solved by the minds that assume no paradigms, which is the methodolgy that created the internet in the first place.

This is a grand experiment with a technology that is adaptive.

It would be a half-day project for a good coder to write the beginnings of a troll-filter, out of site is out of mind.

Matter of fact, registration techniques already exist that can be quite effective.

The article does the same thing that has gotten the print media into the trouble it is now in, set up a straw man and then attack.

The classic definition of insanity thus applies.

Newspapers, blogs and commenting plus anonymity…

Interesting thoughts. I think I’d recommend allow commenting, but perhaps they should also require registration, and if a commenter gets out of hand, block that individual. If registration is allowed, then a real name has to be supplied, but a pseudomym can be allowed. Commenter has a choice – and the newspaper still has an option. It seems to me that some of the more prominent blogs are targets for “blogswarms” (not sure if I’m using this term appropriately) where it’s posted somewhere that xxx blog has posted on yyy topic, and the mass of responders goes to that blog and comments the standard line. They hit and run. Registration with email verification _might_ prevent this, so that only “regulars” could comment.
Anonymity…I use my first name and last initial. It types easily since I don’t use caps. My son is in Iraq, and being slightly paranoid, would prefer that I have _no_ observable presence on the internet. He feels that we have an enemy who is fully capable of taking revenge, and fully capable of finding those upon whom they wish to take revenge. As I said…he’s slightly paranoid. On the other hand, as long as he’s in Iraq, his wish is my command. I sincerely hope his paranoia works to his benefit.

Benefits of allowing comments…

If “blogswarms” are disallowed, comments give a sense of the feelings of the public. The easier it’s made for the public to comment, the more feedback you get, and the greater the reliability of the feedback. If a newspaper isn’t following an agenda, that could be of use – an indication of what the public wants to know, what it needs more info about, the potential direction of the vote. If a newpaper _does_ have an agenda, I can see why they’d want to permit only approved comments – and it has nothing to do with profanity!

Mrs. Former Prosecutor: I’ve always assumed that The Wall Street Journal was the national conservative equivalent of the NYT.

Many of you seem to believe that newspapers are dying because of their political slant to stories. But I’m not aware of any US newspaper whose circulation has grown much since the spread of the internet (please correct me if you know differently).

I also read our local paper for the local news–it’s stuff you can’t get anywhere else and it is valuable. But much of the state/national/international news can be found on-line, real time and much cheaper than in newspapers. I think that’s what’s really killing the newspapers. Perhaps they really do need to start charging for on-line content, or allow access only to people who subscribe to the print version (and then set up a method for only registered users to comment on storied on-line, which would work as a business model)

I also do sign my name to Letters to the Editor when I send them into newspapers. But local residents by and large don’t go around assaulting other local residents in small/midsized US towns because that’s not the way things are done. On the internet or in large cities, though, it can be a different story.

How discussions go on blogs is dependent on the owner of the blog. If you allow rants, bile and vitriol then you can’t have a good discussion. But if you delete the spam and keep the discussions on track then it becomes much easier to have good discussions where ideas are discussed and not the birth history of the blogger or other posters. I think that newspapers should allow comments on their online stories, provided that you have to reveal your actual name and email. Just like the analog version when you send letters to the editor.

I disagree. I have to say I absolutely LOVE the reader comment section whether it’s an online newspaper or a blog such as this one. In fact, it’s very disappointing when there is no opportunity to express one’s opinion and/or read how others feel about it. I am less likely to read if reader comments are not allowed…because it feels like a one way street…although I totally understand the work involved in allowing it.

Having said that, I think it’s very reasonable to ask for someone’s real name when they post. I don’t know how that can be enforced. However, it’s kind of nice being able to post anonymously…people feel freer to comment against PC ness which is so refreshing. Truth, expressed with the intention for the truth, should be encouraged…but I agree that meanness, obscenity or real racism should not be. But don’t we have to allow it all to allow people to post at all?

I have to say, one of our local papers, the Rocky Mountain News (the least liberal of our 2 main papers), has done some amazing reports lately. One was a detailed series of articles on a tragic bug/train accident 40 years ago. They had fantastic multimedia support online.

Their current 7-day series is on the state of Denver Public Schools. They partnered with an education research company and the school district to report specific statistics on the number of families (huge numbers) leaving the traditional schools for alternatives, including charters, private, magnet, and surrounding school districts. It’s also supported by multimedia tools including a tool to search for your school and get the detail (we live in Jefferson County, the state’s largest school district so our schools aren’t included).

The timing of the series is also fantastic, following on the footsteps of a nasty email sent between the chairs of the Senate and House Education Committees: “There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherizers. They deserve it!”

The chair of the Senate Education Committee, followed that up by calling kids who want to complete their education online “lazy”.

It’s an extremely interesting series. Anyone interested in education choice should read it:

http://cfapp2.rockymountainnews.com/dps/

I only wish they would do this for our school district too.

They done other great reporting from sending a reporter and photographer to embed in Iraq, to a Pulizer Prize-winning report called “Final Salute” about how the Marines honor their fallen comrades.

I think the Rocky is one paper that “gets it”.

I think Tyrian’s ideas are excellent. Especially in regards to linking to studies referenced in an article. I’m a newspaper fanatic. I think the focus for editors should not be how they can be more like blogs, but how they can better fulfill their specific mission to report the facts. There will always be quibbles about bias toward the left. Or, as the case with the Moonie paper, toward the right. There will never be a way to satisfly everyone’s political bent.

But, if you as an editor make it possible to reach beyond the news and give them a portal to further examination of what you have presented as news, no one can claim the “liberal” media isn’t telling the truth.

I abhor the comments section on local newspapers’ websites. It could be a story about the city building pedestrian crosswalks on a busy thoroughfare in the suburbs yet you will find many comments such as “n*ggers are driving this county into the ground.” (direct quote) Okay, but what does that have to do with the crosswalk idea?

>>…yet you will find many comments such as “n*ggers are driving this county into the ground.” (direct quote)>>

Whoah. What part of the country is this?

David,

I don’t know about “feeding” us the news. You seem to say you want more detail in the stories (I think). But, as readership goes down, publishers tend to analyze broadcast news trends and frontload their papers with celebrity-driven stories rather than substantive stories.

Since most newspapers really depend on the classifieds, the internet phenomenon they are most concerned about is Craigslist.

An interesting quote by AP writer Travis Loller:

[T]he anonymity of the Internet lets readers post obscenities and racist hate speech that would never be allowed in the printed paper.

Given the ultra-Stalinist politics of most of AP and the rest of the MSM, I am not surprised by this claim. To the lords of the MSM, anyone who does not agree with their viewpoint chapter-and-verse is a (pick one or more of the following) racist, homophobe, war-monger, sexist, anti-science reactionary.

I contend that the MSM – which gave us Rosie O’Donnell, Hugh Hefner, “insurgents”, Code Pink, Al Sharpton and a host of other culutral hazards too numerous to mention, would not know “racism” or “obscenity” if it walked in and sat down in their laps.

Thus, I believe that there is another possible reason for “newspapers” to shy away from reader participation (aside from pure contempt). If a blog allows commenting – and there are few or no comments – that is a good sign that very few are reading it. So what if a newspaper was published – and no one read it?

“If I can blog under my real name and stand behind what I say, I don’t see why anyone else (blogger or commenter) can’t do the same.”

I don’t know. Have you ever been googled by a prospective employer? I know employers who do use internet search tools to see what is available. It isn’t uncommon, and it’s becoming more common.

Political slant isn’t a protected equal employment right; so looking for work in education (and having conservative viewpoints attached to your name) or looking for work say as a church secretary (and having certain liberal viewpoints) can lose you a job easily. Even if you keep your personal and professional life separate, your propsective employer doesn’t have to.

I can certainly understand wanting psedonymity, although if my name were John Smith, or if I were looking for a political/editorial job my blog comments might be a benefit and not a potential detriment.

Until then, I’ll use a pseudonym. Sorry if that offends.

Do you want to know what’s killing newspapers? I’ll tell ya. Journalism School.

I was the only non-J-school staffer on my college newspaper. J schools don’t exactly attract rocket scientists, and post-Watergate, they tended to attract the not-too-bright-but-idealistic.

Grads go to work and are never accountable for anything more consequential than making deadline. They don’t have to meet sales quotas. They don’t have to make payroll. They risk nothing all their lives.

They certainly aren’t going to risk crossing over to the Internet where suddenly they’d be up against lawyers, professors, scientists and other enterprising people, people who have the advantage 1) of real-world experience and 2) not having taken the classes where you learn to write only in shades of gray.

Gekkobear–FYI: Some (not all) of the states do have statutes or case law that provides employees with protection for their political affiliation.

Conventional journalism has suffered increasingly, for decades, from ludicrously skewed templates: Always a collectivist Statist (”left liberal”) ideological bias that studiously omits all items tending to refute its sodden theses.

Nowhere in conventional reporting, from a booming economy to Democrat political scandals to “surges” in Iraq, will you find the slightest evidence of honest, validly referenced sources for mass media assertions repeated to the point of propaganda rituals. Last year’s Israeli – Syrian confrontation, with its fauxtography and vile anti-Semitic promotion of Hezbollah terrorism, is but the most egregious recent case.

Absent context and perspective, backed by decent sources, one has nothing. “Today the Dow broke 13000″: So what? What was this index, three, five years ago; as housing falls, gold and oil both soar, does this indicate a blow-off top like 1999 or accelerating bidding driven by given economic fundamentals? No “reporter” knows, so why not reference expert opinion concerning political economics (Bush’s tax cuts), global commodities and currencies, etc? We can’t wait.

What’s wrong with “dead-tree” media is nothing more than that Pinch Sulzberger and his ilk march in lockstep to render its contents irrelevent, unreadable (”a dog’s breakfast,” says Mark Steyn). Soon enough, Al Gore will be Pinch’s lone subscriber– idiocy in print seems more official.

C’mon Monster,

You have to do it like the Machine does it:

The Monster doesn’t want to have to explain…

@ suek – Philadelphia
@ redbeard – the Boston Globe doesn’t publish LETTERS w/ the n-bomb in them, however, they open the comments on certain stories and people just go buck wild w/ the n-bomb and everything else. I don’t think you even have to leave an email address to leave a comment. They’re like trolls on a messageboard: ultra annoying.

“Grads go to work and are never accountable for anything more consequential than making deadline. They don’t have to meet sales quotas. They don’t have to make payroll. They risk nothing all their lives.”

Comment by Charlie

David Bloom and Michael Kelly did what again?

Oops!

The Machine is self employed.

.

Imagine if we all drove the exact same of make/model/color of car that carried no identifying number. Now imagine we were allowed to drive around without a license plate, registration, or license and could give any silly name, maybe one like “crosspatch” any time someone asked us for one and we could give different names to different people at different times. How do you think people would behave on the road and what other crimes would they use their car to commit?

That is similar to the situation we have on the internet. People demand to be anonymous on the Internet yet will gladly give their name to someone they meet in person. If I were that newspaper, I wouldn’t “agonize” over the situation at all. I would give anyone that wanted one a comment account … after they write in and ask for one giving their name and address and the password mailed back to the address they gave.

When people are required to give their real name, they tend to behave themselves. All the newspaper needs to do is simply not allow anonymous comments. Require them to identify themselves and allow only others who have also identified themselves to see the comments and participate in the discussion. Otherwise you are going to play “wack a mole” with idiots all day long.

MSM have been feeding us all the slant they want. If they listened to the market then internet and fox would not have taken off the way they have. Newspaper part of the MSM seems to be somewhat less offensive, Rocky mountain news is very good but we do not get it here. Enjoy my small town newspaper, all 24 pages of it. One must use their name.

Rules for comments. Adopt them wholesale from this blog. Being able to comment is a part of what I like about it. The level of discourse is good and other posters open my eyes to ramifications I would otherwise not have noticed.

My MD is from India. Among all the usual waiting room material are a few publications from there. Comment level adds interest as well as pointing out some different ways of looking at the world. Read the Hong Kong and Singapore papers while overseas and they and the Korean papers greatly added to the experience.

It would be a tragedy if we lost our newspapers. An ongoing tragedy that is going on in our schools
spells at least a warning of the death of our attempt at civilization. Life without education would be “nasty, brutish and short.” I happen to believe that life without the Gospel would be worse than that.

Shawn,

One thing that the editors and reporters miss about people commenting on stories is that if a paper is ‘hip’ online and off the follow-on enhances the story. Not only that but readers can know more background or dirt than the reporters discovered that could be included in a follow-up story that would have never been produced otherwise.

Newspapers have fouled up in two ways. “Bias” exists, but it’s a secondary effect that makes the foulups worse.

The lesser of the two errors is that they have essentially abandoned “who, what, when, and where” in favor of “why”. That comes partly from hubris, yes, but even more so from economic considerations. Opinion is cheap compared to keeping a decent reporter–someone who can and does dig for the first four “W”s–in the field. Unfortunately for them, opinion is also a buyer’s market, and that’s what really hurts about the Internet. Paying a Krugman six figures is just a loss when you can get umpteen similar opinions for free.

But the worst error, the one that’s really killing them, is “if it bleeds it leads.” They note that when something startling or amazing comes up, they get more readers. From this they conclude that the only way to do “news” is to continually startle and amaze the readers. Part of the problem with that is habituation — it turns into a loser’s game of “top this if you can!” — but more importantly, it turns the sophisticated readers off. If the movers and shakers read your paper other people will go along in the hope that some of the status will rub off. If nobody’s reading except the mouth-breathers who get all excited about J-Lo’s boyfriends, the sophisticated are run off twice, once by the content and once by the association.

Bias makes it worse by cutting the remaining audience in half, but the other two effects are primary. If they fixed those the bias would repair itself.

Regards,
Ric

The Machine is killing me!

Heliotrope’s anecdote reminded me of the legendary one about some editor being quick enough to catch an error in the E=mc^2 equation from some reporter.

If I were in charge of reforming journalism, I would do away with the j-school degree. It’s a ridiculous idea. I took the classes, and learned nothing there that I would not have learned in the newsroom or in the field.

Instead I think to work a “beat,” the reporter should be able to demonstrate subject-matter expertise. Or at least have a working knowledge of the area they’re covering–and prove themselves willing to become more knowledgeable.

For example, no reporter who doesn’t know the scientific method should be permitted to cover science stories. That reporter won’t know what questions to ask, or could get taken in by a “cold fusion” type scam, or might get the facts but garble them in the transmission to the reader (confuse fission vs. fusion or theory vs. hypothesis for instance).

I had thought my idea was how it worked in practice, so I figured out what beats interested me and decided to take classes towards understanding the fundamentals: criminal justice classes in case I had to write about crime and cops, foreign language classes, tech classes to write about computers and so on. Well rounded liberal arts with an emphasis on certain subjects that would help me cover preferred beats.

It turned out that reporters could go report on a country without being expected to know the language or the culture.

A military man complained to the Washington Times recently about their reporter confusing ranks and their abbreviations–a few years ago it never would have occurred to me that a reporter who didn’t know those details could get assigned stories about the military. Don’t I feel naive!

This looks like a top down problem: if the editor doesn’t know anything, they can’t pull a James Kilpatrick (in one class we would read reprints of his columns; very educational). If they can’t emulate him, I don’t foresee a bright future for them.

Online newspapers allowing comments will find all their time taken up with filtering/deleting obscene comments. The idea has disaster written all over it.

If newspapers stuck to “The 5 W’s” they might do better.

And if my aunt had a mustache, she’d be my uncle.

My aversion to using my real name is the searchability and everlastingness of internet posts. I don’t want a Google search of my name to turn up every half-wit thing I say–even if all of it seemed golden on the day I wrote it.

If all my high-school and college opinions were available to every relative, potential date and employer at the touch of a button? Sheesh. If every potentially heated debate with a political adversary had to be abandoned out of concern that my tone would embarass my grandchildren in sixty years? Or that my expression of my views, easily searchable, could cause some liberal school teacher to take a special interest in “deprogramming” my children?! Forget it.

If newspapers ever do require real names, then, at the least, it is necessary that they be non-searchable and have a relatively short life span, after which they get purged from the net.

Redbeard and Tyrian,

Aren’t there plenty of hunting and gun magazines out there for the “enthusiasts” to buy if they so chose? What you’re seeking is a tacit acceptance of the gun culture. A newspaper runs a car article or column because everyone (most everyone) has drive a car. But, guns as part of the mainstream is a matter of debate. You don’t think sending someone like yourselves to cover any and all gun stories would color the issue?