A double-standard for print and online comments?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 April 2007 at 14:08
Tags: Blogs, Comment is Free, News & Observer, Telegraph.co.uk, interactivity

The blogosphere is abuzz with debate about the suggestion by Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales that there should be a voluntary code of conduct for bloggers.

The aim of the idea — to crack down on the incivility in comments fields — is laudable, particularly in light of the death threats that Kathy Sierra received on her blog. But codification of blogger behaviour is also out of step with the libertarian culture of the Internet. It can’t be much of a surprise that the reaction has been largely negative.

That may be true for the anarchic world of personal blogs, but things have been much more regulated on the large forums and blogs hosted by major publications, which are more exposed to and more concerned about the possible damage to their established brands from allowing debate to run (too) rampant.

Most major media blogs have terms of use and moderation policies that effectively enforce a code of conduct like the one Wales and O’Reilly are advocating.

Balancing the need to moderate discussion while also encouraging the online feedback that improves their writers’ journalism is one of the major issues have long preoccupied the group of online journalists who have specialised in the (relatively) new field of community management.

One of the issues being raised in the proposed code of conduct is whether bloggers should tolerate anonymity in their blog’s comments. This has also frequently been a major sticking point for news organisations trying to introduce online community features.

In many cases, news organisations’ online community managers introduced anonymous (or verified and consistently pseudonymous) commenting on their web sites for the first time. Often this was achieved only after long-fought internal debates that saw online community managers clashing with their users cries of censorship on one had, which taking on long-established journalistic traditions that demanded more verification and selection of user feedback, as on traditional letters pages.

Those debates aren’t entirely over, as a column published this week by Ted Vaden, the public editor at the News & Observer in North Carolina, shows.

After inviting online on a proposal for the state government to apologise for slavery, the newspaper’s onlie comments included racist abuse, leading Vaden to ask:

Maybe there is a place in the blogosphere for this kind of vitriol, but I ask you, should the newspaper be the sponsoring forum? Most of the other comments also were opposed to apology, which is fine, but they made their points more civilly.

This snapshot of online argumentation raises anew the question of whether The N&O, as it ventures further and further into interactive communication, should allow input from outsiders to be anonymous.

Several readers have pointed out the inconsistency of the paper requiring that letters to the editor be signed, while comments to blogs and contributions to forums are allowed to be anonymous, or pseudonymous. Readers justifiably ask: Is that not a lowering of the newspaper’s standards?

After highlighting some other unfortunate incidents that the paper has experienced in its blogs, Vaden recounted the various technical and manpower issues that limit its comment. The bigger issue, though, is whether different standards should be applied to blog comments than to letters to the editor. Vaden’s survey of the newsroom shows opinion sharply divided among the paper’s editors.

Vaden concludes that in the interests of quality, the number of online comments that the paper publishes should probably be reduced. It’s a policy that, if implemented, would put one of the web’s pioneering newspapers well out of step with current practice, and would probably reduce the amount of interactivity with the site tremendously.

But is lowering the tone of a serious news site a price worth paying for greater interactivity and community-building? It’s an issue that most online news organisations are grappling with in some form. The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, for example, has gone through several debates about comment civility and anonymity in the first year of its existence, and has gone quite far in the opposite direction from the one advocated by Vaden.

The Telegraph’s community editor, Shane Richmond, as also also rejected proposed code, and pointed to an older post explaining the moderation policy for the Telegraph’s blogs.

It’s a balancing act, but who’s got it right?