We knew it would happen eventually, but the reality is hard to take: A reporter has received a quasi-death threat in a comment on a Missourian story. Yep. You can read Chris Dunn’s blog entry on the topic here. We’ve since deleted the offending comment from the story, but here’s the pertinent portion:
I’m sure that Mr.Kellogg appreciates this reporter letting criminals KNOW where to get a free gun whenever he is on campus. Let’s just hope that the first person that has to face this weapon is the “reporter” that so willingly disclosed this information.
After reading the comment, Chris e-mailed her editor, Phill Brooks, who talked to our managing editor, Jeanne Abbott, who removed the comment. Phill is pretty upset about the situation, as he should be. His proposal was that we review comments before publication, which a lot of papers won’t do due to misguided fears of being held liable for “editing” comments. Although I find that reasoning bogus, I’m also not a huge fan of editing our comments before publication, mostly due to the fact that I think it detracts from our goals of immediacy and fostering conversation.
Regardless, our commenting system is broken and it’s not getting any better. I had one of our frequent commenters call me at work to complain about it, and others have requested meetings in Jake Sherlock’s office with attorneys present. (It’s not a proposal I envy Jake for receiving.)
The good news is that our current Web site is going away, soon, so we have the opportunity to burn commenting to the ground and start over. This list is a good starting set of suggestions on commenting, including both “why comments suck” and “how you can unsuck them.” I certainly agree with this observation, which is our ongoing problem:
Get better tools and learn how to use them. Waiting for users to flag an offensive comment and then summarily deleting it and banning the user isn’t comment moderation. It’s a tool box with only a sledge hammer in it. Learn about ideas like ghosting, disemvowellment, comment editing, etc. And if you’re allowing anything that resembles anonymous commenting, stop that right now.
I’m not sure that we would make any headway on anonymous commenting — that’s pretty well entrenched on our site right now. But I do think that we could do better about allowing our commenting community to police itself. I’ve always liked the way Tigerboard does “mob rule,” which many sites do in a similar way with reputational voting. Clearly we also need to do a better job of threading comments and replying to them by getting our reporters involved in the conversation.
What are some other things we should do with our comments? I’d love to hear other opinions on this.
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