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Saundra Keyes is a journalism professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno. Reach her at skeyes@unr.edu.
Many editors also hope that, with time and the right tools, user-posted comments will evolve and result in more meaningful discussions between readers and the newspaper
COMMUNITY POLICING WOULD BE THE ideal way to ensure that online discussions are thoughtful and civil, said Pat Dougherty, editor of the Anchorage Daily News.
"You want people to say, 'This conversation is valuable, and we're not going to let people hijack it by being knuckleheads. We're going to report abuse aggressively. The newspaper is going to support us by deleting them or banning people who behave inappropriately.'"
But when asked if he sees that climate on his site, Dougherty replied, "If that's the case, it's really nascent."
Michael Nelson, editor of the Lincoln Journal Star, would like to see a two-tier system for handling online comments, the first of them self-policed and cross-checked by editors. "And then there'd be this mud fight that would underlie that, where software would sort out selected words and phrases," Nelson said.
Many newsrooms use software as Nelson suggests, either developing it in-house or purchasing it from vendors, often through newspaper-group contracts.
Such tools are essential, as only one-fourth of newsrooms reporting use of story comments require moderator review before posting. Even fewer of those reporting use of topic-based forums - 12.5 percent - pre-screen those postings.
About 54 percent of newsrooms maintaining forums and inviting story comments said such content is always reviewed after posting, sometimes by staff, occasionally by outside moderators and by thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings that users can bestow.
Some software mentioned by survey participants can support a range of user-generated content, such as blogs, photo galleries and social networks. But with such usage in its infancy on many sites, survey respondents most often described the software's usefulness in content policing.
Common tools include obscenity filters and "report abuse" links that users can click for objectionable content.
The Bellingham (Wash.) Herald, for example, uses Pluck software configured so that three abuse reports remove a comment from general view, meaning that users must click a separate link to read it.
Quarantined comments are reviewed four times daily, said Executive Editor Julie Shirley, who expressed surprise at how seldom users report abuse.
Some newsrooms delete comments receiving three abuse reports, but Bellingham sets that threshold at 10.
"The hard part for me is that there's a lot of content that I think is vile, but I don't think it's my place to take it down," Shirley said.
Besides deleting specific comments, editors sometimes shut down entire discussions that turn too ugly. Nearly 40 percent of editors reporting use of story comments did so within the last year, identifying their top reasons as racist, sexist or anti-gay comments, other categories of hurtful comment and foul language.
As a pre-emptive move, some editors turn off comment links before posting stories on topics likely to generate inflammatory or unproductive postings. Examples mentioned were crime and courts reporting, especially when it involves sexual assault, and stories dealing with race or immigration issues.
The most extreme policing action is to ban specific users, as 46 percent of newsrooms reporting use of online comments did in the past year. An even higher proportion of newsrooms maintaining topic-based forums - 61 percent - reported such bans.
Foul language tied with racist, sexist or anti-gay comments as top reasons for the bans, followed by bullying of other users and nondiscriminatory but hurtful comments.
“The hard part for me is that there’s a lot of content that I think is vile, but I don’t think it’s my place to take it down.”
Juile Shirley, executive editor, The Bellingham (Wash.) Herald
Editors reported enforcing the bans through screen names and e-mail or IP addresses, though most noted that determined posters can easily circumvent those methods.
Some reported a new twist on the "bozo filters" that have long been used to block unwanted e-mail, a tool that makes banned users' comments invisible to everyone but themselves.
Several editors who use Pluck software described the bozo filter as its only tool for banning users, but Adam Weinroth, director of product marketing, said his company provides other options. He said the bozo filter "is very effective, as you can imagine, because the offending user is not tipped off about some action that's being taken against them."
Asked if editors ever express concern that the filter is not transparent, Weinroth said, "Not really, because there's not really a negative consequence."
The Tulsa World, where programmers created a similar filter, used the tool to ban 415 posters between May and December of last year, said Web Editor Jason Collington.
"Some have caught on and some have not," he said. "One we bozoed the first week has made 7,000 comments on our site, and he thinks people still see them."
Collington, who said "80 percent of our commenters are wonderful," was among several editors hoping to add full-time moderators when they responded to the ASNE survey. Interviewed two months later, however, those editors said staffing cuts or redeployments had tabled such plans.
None foresaw the kind of moderation that occurs at The New York Times, where every comment is reviewed before posting. The Times added a comment desk of four part-timers in 2007, when it began accepting online comments on selected stories and editorials. By the end of 2008, that desk had grown to 15 part-timers, or about eight FTEs, said Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman. Blogs are moderated primarily by their authors or by desk editors.
"The issue for me is not preventing every dirty word from getting through," said Landman. "The shock threshold is fairly high in this day and age. What is important is that you have an environment that is appealing for the kind of people you want. That's important and very hard to achieve."
Landman said online comments often are viewed primarily as user participation, "and that's fine. In a democracy, the ability of people to converse and challenge is good.
"But the comments are not just participation. They're content. And at their best, they add information, perspective (and) points of view. What you want to make sure of is that that content is generally consistent with the content on the site at large."
So far, he said, the only way The Times has found to achieve such consistency is moderating comments.
"It's a burden, and I'm not happy with that," he said. "You pay a price. You don't get them up as fast, and people get frustrated. It does restrict the ebb and flow."
Landman and others stressed that newsrooms must be as committed to rewarding good comments as they are to filtering bad ones.
At The Times, moderators can highlight "editors' selections," which are identified online as "the most interesting and thoughtful comments that represent a range of views."
Many sites include tools allowing readers to "recommend" effective postings, with the resulting tallies shown on comment links.
Some newspapers reverse-publish their best Web comments in the print edition, both to entice print readers online and to reward value-added postings.
The Orlando Sentinel is among those papers, although plans to print Web comments daily proved overly optimistic.
"Frankly, it got to be difficult finding (enough) coherent comments," said Editor Charlotte Hall. "It would be really great if we could develop, over time, a way to generate more meaningful discourse on the Web."
That is a goal other editors share as they slog through inane or outrageous comments that are often posted on their sites.
"I think the ultimate prize is worth chasing, and that prize is a reasonably intelligent discussion of matters of public interest," said Dougherty, the Anchorage editor. "And the question is, can you develop a sort of ethic among users? Can you get the technology that will allow you to manage it so you're able to separate the wheat from the chaff?
"I don't think where we are is where we want to be, but where we want to be is a good place." *
Previous ... Fiery forums
Also, see Kurt Greenbaum's column
How to make story comments better