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
Interesting stuff I saw online, Mar. 21 to Mar. 24
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Mar. 21 through Mar. 24:
- Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls – A couple of the comments on this story might be more interesting than the item itself: "The challenge Obama faces in allowing conversation at the digital White House is obvious: trolls. Discussion-thread veterans will tell you that politics attracts more vicious, raging, insult-hurling trolls than almost any other topic."
- Economist Blames Twitter for Down Economy – Professor Martin Schmeldon of Harvard Business School recently released research findings that suggest excessive Twitter use may have caused the current economic downturn.
- The rise and fall of social media (according to mainstream media reportage) | higher ed marketing – The seven phases of mainstream media coverage of social media, illustrated with a chart.
- Xark!: 2020 vision: What's next for news – Wow. An incredibly comprehensive outline for trends and ideas to look out for in the next generation of news. A reading assignment, but worth a look.
Kurt's Tweets- Realizing how woefully out of touch I have been with this part of the county. (@ Saint Louis Bread Company) http://4sq.com/5z5Bfh
- Just had my first Gmail phone call -- with my parents -- and the quality was fantastic. Wow. http://tcrn.ch/a8GndI
- Another day, another interview. Fingers crossed. (@ Saint Louis Bread Co) http://4sq.com/avGImL
- Helping my son learn the first 20 elements on the periodic table. Disturbed by how many more elements there are since I studied this stuff.
- Giving blood. (@ St. Martin's Episcopal Church) http://4sq.com/aiWuEk