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.
Anti-gay story comments inspire playwright
Joan Lipkin
A colleague of mine has written a story about playwright Joan Lipkin, a veteran of the drama scene in the St. Louis area, who found inspiration for a play from the story comments she found on our newsroom’s website, STLtoday.com.
As Doug Moore described it, the original story (which he also wrote) was “about prominent gays turning to activism.“ Readers posted at least 330 comments on that story, many of them less-than-supportive of the gay community. Unfortunately, the original story is no longer in the STLtoday database, so I can’t link to it. An excerpt from Doug’s follow-up story:
“It is ridiculous that there is a story about a successful gay man in the paper. Now I know why the Post is going under,” wrote one reader, identified as “W. Champion.” It is one of 16 reader comments sprinkled throughout a new play Lipkin has written with Sharon Bandy, a playwright from Chattanooga, Tenn.
And there’s this: Read more
6 reasons we’re lazy about story comments
My most recent column for the American Society of News Editors, for The American Editor, which will be published online only henceforth. I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, and have been waiting for ASNE to post it.
***
We have arrived at yet another spasm of consternation over the value of readers’ comments on the stories we write — at least the third such spasm in the past two years. A spate of news stories, commentaries, blog items and surveys have come out. We debate whether readers should be allowed to comment. We deplore the quality of the comments. We lament the effect they may have on our brands.
A recent item in MinnPost.com outlined the tension in newsrooms between allowing the discourse to occur unfettered and slapping restrictions on readers’ ability to comment. In particular, the story highlighted the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate comments on eight categories of stories, including those involving Muslims, crime, gays and race.
A blog item on Poynter.org last month noted several examples of news organizations that had curtailed or eliminated story comments because of their concerns over quality — particularly racist rants and personal attacks on readers.
Reacting to some of this news, my own newspaper blogged about the issue of story comment quality, surveying readers on their opinion of the comments. Since the unscientific poll went up July 16, more than 700 readers have voted. Fifty-eight percent said comments should be dropped. Only 28 percent chose this option: “Worth having. But improve your system of policing them.”
That’s the option I chose. Read more
Liskula Cohen case reminder: Consider the source
Liskula Cohen
Recent developments in the Liskula Cohen/anonymous blogger/”skank” case have launched a round of comment in traditional and new media sites over the value of anonymous comment, whether the right to be anonymous is under attack and even whether courts should somehow tame the Internet.
Ultimately, I see the case as a reminder that increasingly, the web means readers must be discerning about the source. That doesn’t mean anonymous speech should be dismissed, ignored or banned.
In my own newsroom, at least one reporter has engaged me in discussions over the case, forwarding me “The Moral of the Story” blogger’s take on the case in The New York Times, which calls the kind of vile anonymous commenting we’re all familiar with a malignancy.
The importance of anonymous speech in our democracy has already been widely discussed. That the right to be anonymous would ever be at issue is ridiculous, though I will confess this right now: It’s very easy for me to don the rose-colored glasses on the subject. I’ve never been the victim of an anonymous attack on my character or my livelihood. I’ve not been denied business or opportunity because, unknown to me, someone made a flawed judgment of me based on a scurrilous, anonymous attack.
So anonymity isn’t going away. The fact that anonymous speakers can be help liable for their violations of law isn’t going to change; anonymous speakers always risk being exposed. That’s why John Doe cases are filed.
It seems to me that the biggest value of this case for the rest of us is a reminder to consider the source. When readers are faced with an anonymous comments, they have two choices. Read more
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
- Waiting for a listings collector to give her more #Patch marketing cards. The work never stops.