Follow up: The vulgar comment & the school
Cross-posted from The Editors’ Desk on STLtoday.com.
As you can imagine, we’ve watched the uproar closely in the wake of my blog post on Monday. I recounted the case of a person who lost his job at a local school after twice posting a vulgar comment on the Talk of the Day blog on Friday.
We don’t condone vulgarity or obscenity on our site. We won’t tolerate it. Increasingly, we are concerned about the tone of the conversation on STLtoday. When we can, we ban people without apology for bad behavior. We have taken steps to beef up our review process and we’ll continue to enhance those measures to address bad language and intolerant speech.
We also miss stuff, so we depend on you to point out those comments and help us deal with them. That’s not new; we’ve said that from the beginning. We want to hear from you.
On Friday, I saw the reader’s comments, I noticed the comments came from a school and I made the decision to call. The school used its server logs to track the comments, based on the time they were made, to a single work station. After confronting the employee, he resigned. Since then, I’ve heard the criticism, loud and clear.
The criticism of me falls largely in four categories. First, that I overreacted, using an atomic fly-swatter to address the issue. Second, that I somehow violated our privacy policy. Third, that I’ve set some sort of precedent for how we deal with readers who make obscene comments. And fourth, that I was gleeful or boastful in blogging about the incident in the first place. Read more
Post a vulgar comment at work, lose your job
Courtesy altemark via Flickr
A single vulgar word cost a man his job on Friday.
It all started with Friday’s edition of Talk of the Day, a regular blog on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website, STLtoday.com. Talk of the Day is exactly that. A conversation around the water-cooler topic of the day. Friday’s edition is often a little lighter. Last week, it was about the strangest things you’ve ever eaten, loosely pegged on a story about deer meat.
By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted a vulgar, two-syllable word for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.
A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included.
About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
Kurt's Tweets- Why is this not a national story? Maybe I missed it. Appalling. Disabled woman was tortured and held as a sex slave http://ow.ly/2CiAq
- Bravo. RT @pwthornton: "Banning unsigned online comments undermines the media’s role as a forum for debate.” http://bit.ly/bmZsOn
- I would like to just take the two steps forward and skip the one step back. How about that? Would that be OK?
- Still seeking talented journalists to run #Patch sites in two south St. Louis County communities. Know anyone? http://ow.ly/2Axnv
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