Reader requests more responsible commenting on articles
I’ve posted recently about comments on our site. I was talking about how other news organizations are looking at their comments and trying to find ways to improve the the level of dialogue for their audience.
Then, the very same day, I received this bit of feedback from one of our visitors through our feedback form at the bottom of the site.
I read your articles on the net, and sometimes respond. And I read what others say, especially those written to/about Berry Tramel. There are a couple of people who are regular ‘responders’ there who are nothing less than vicious, and should be screened from. They seem to have a vendetta against the Oklahoman and Trammel, and anyone who writes in his defense gets mauled. They attack the writer and not the substance. One writer (writing about the article concerning the cell phone usage at the OU libarary) threatened a person who dis- agreed with him a civil law suit in federal court. This is not acceptable. People should be reminded to keep their remarks germane and civil, or warned that what they write will be expunged. …. I am willing to help in any way you might deem appropriate.
Excellent. There’s one person on the team.
We’ll come up with something. Stay tuned.
Article comments drawing attention on news sites like NewsOK.com
The Poynter Institute, which I was fortunate enough to visit about two weeks ago, posted a story about a trend in article comments on news sites around the country.
The headline caught my attention:
It caught my attention because when we read some of the comments on some of our articles, it makes us cringe, as well.
Note that I said some of the comments on some of the articles.
I am convinced that allowing comments on articles on NewsOK.com is important. It’s the foundation of what we try to accomplish as journalists with a news Web site. We want the community to be engaged with the news that we are covering. We want our audience to have a voice. We want them to participate.
But it becomes difficult to defend some of the commentary that happens on our site as “contributing to the public discourse.”
Some of those same discussions are clearly happening at other places. Take this example from the Poynter article.
Some news organizations have set up formal policies to delineate which stories users can comment on. Others operate on loose guidelines or deal with stories case-by-case.
We actually do both. We have a policy, but we break that policy that if we feel a there is great public demand and greater good to offer community discussion about a story. We’ve opened comments on some articles, and been criticized for it in our own comments. That’s fine – it’s part of the public discussion. But there is reasoning put behind each decision the NewsOK online editors are making — and the audience is at the base of the reasoning.
And this excerpt:
Not everyone, however, agrees with limiting comments even on controversial stories. Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, said in an e-mail that his paper usually only closes comments on stories involving legal issues around contempt of court or libel. Ingram believes that a lot of important discourse is lost by limiting comments to only uncontroversial stories.
And Mr. Ingram’s thoughts are precisely why we offer comments to stories like the Pharmacy Shooting from earlier this summer or the Trooper/EMT scuffle. Sure, there is a risk of the comments being turned into back-and-forth name-calling (or, possibly, much worse). But the goal of providing the public a forum to share their thoughts outweighs the obvious risk — at least right now.
I’ll continue to push for comments to be a key part of NewsOK.com. And we’ll continue to search for ways to keep the conversation constructive.
I encourage you to participate as much as you can to make NewsOK.com a place where news is delivered and news is shared.
Comments now available on pharmacy shooting story
Our policy on comments on our articles is very clear.
It is not our intent to offer comments on crime or fatality stories.
It’s so clear that our users who regularly comment remind us of the policy if an article slips through the cracks. They know the policy as well as we do.
But sometimes, stories become bigger than a policy. Sometimes, the need to have a conversation exceeds the well-intentioned rule.
The Pharmacy Shooting story is the perfect example.
We were discussing the option of opening up the comments on this story yesterday. In the end, we launched a poll to allow users to weigh in on the subject.
Today, after seeing the interest continue to grow and the debate turning into a discussion about issues deeper than this one case, we knew we had to open a forum to let the voices of our audience be heard on this issue.
So we opened comments on this story on a separate page and embedded those comments on our ongoing coverage page of the story.
We want you to share your thoughts on this story. We know you have an opinion. It’s impossible not to have a unique viewpoint on this story.
But keep in mind the words of our Digital News Editor, Robb Hibbard, who wrote the intro to our commenting page for the pharmacy shooting:
Please note that commenters are expected to stay on topic and forward the conversation.
Simply put, we want this to be a place of intelligent discussion – not a place of threats and name-calling.
Dying Too Young: Why are Oklahoma’s children dying?
We launched a project on Sunday that appears to have made in impact on our community.
And that’s a good thing, because making a difference in our community is something we strive for with our journalistic efforts in the News and Information Center at OPUBCO Communications Group.
We launched “Dying Too Young” on Sunday and have pushed more traffic to it throughout the week. The project documents the more than 2,100 deaths of children in Oklahoma over the past few years – an alarmingly high number for our state.
This project has a little bit of everything:
- It has great reporting, led by our top investigative reporter, Nolan Clay. This project took months to organize and put together. Nolan didn’t write this piece up in an afternoon. To cover something like this with fairness and proper effectiveness, it takes months of behind-the-scenes work.
- It has a deep database, put together painstakingly by our database editor Paul Monies.
- It has a comments board for discussion, reaching more than 125 comments already.
- It has gripping videos from our video team, showcasing some chilling interviews of those affected by some of the deaths.
- It has documentation, with hundred of autopsy reports in PDF formats and bios or almost 100 of the children.
Take the time to see the reports. Then you can join our discussion and share your thoughts.
Visitors missing comments on stories today
We received this message at 8:37 a.m. today:
The comment engines on www.newsok.com appear to be out of order. None of the stories have comments and none of the comments are “sticking.” I find it rather strange that its now 8 AM and there are “0″ comments about the Obama inauguration front page story. It just has to be a server error of some kind.
This is odd. And we had already been looking at the problem. We noticed the issue early this morning when it seemed equally odd to us that no comments had been made on our top stories.
By 9:15 a.m., new comments were being seen on the site. By 10 a.m., all other under-the-covers problems with the comments were fixed.
We’re back to normal now. Our “Remaking America” story now has 88 comments.
The problem stemmed from our tweaks to the commenting system last night, after one of our users spent the day abusing our open commenting system. The user’s comments deteriorated the atmosphere on our comments and ruined the experience for the rest of the group on our site.
However, often when you make a series of programming additions to your site, something can go wrong. Early this morning, we saw the problem.
Sorry for the glitch. Comment away. Just keep them clean, so I don’t have to claw out my eyes as I read the comments.
NewsOK speedy again after BCS hangover
At 10:31 a.m. this morning, we received two questions from a NewsOK visitor. Here’s the first part:
do you realize your website is completely unusable today?
Yes – we realized that we were suffering from site performance problems for a significant part of the morning today. It was bad timing, since we were prepared for a massive traffic surge after the Sooners’ loss to Florida last night in the BCS National Championship game.
After a lot of research from our programming, development and server administration teams, we found the culprit … the massive amount of traffic on our main article, coupled with the massive amount of comments made on that article, led to unforeseen overload on our database servers.
Basically, the volume of traffic caused some of our users to experience issues trying to load our Web site. The “nuance” has been adjusted. And the extremely occasional unforeseen problem is a byproduct of being the largest Web site in Oklahoma that is growing at a remarkable rate.
(And when I write “occasional unforeseen problem,” I mean it. Our site-disruption rate would rank well with any site in the world.)
We don’t want it to happen again and are taking additional steps to find unforeseen issues.
And now for the trick question – the second part of our visitor’s question.
how can a news organization be this inept?
Um … nice try. I’ll have to re-phrase before I can answer.
Seriously, I don’t blame this person for being frustrated. I’m certain many other visitors were equally frustrated. And they had every right to be.
But trust me when I say that I doubt your frustration matched our own as we investigated the issue. We pride ourselves on delivering information to the world when you want it.
You demand it. We deliver it. That’s the deal.
That is our goal on a lazy July day, and it’s our goal on a busy post-national championship day. It will be our goal tomorrow.
Regardless, please try us again. I promise that all the content is still there now if you couldn’t get it before – as are the 600-plus reader comments on the primary OU-Florida article. Sorry you couldn’t get it when you demanded it.
NewsOK community helps woman
Our top story on NewsOK.com this morning was about a woman in Wilson cares for more than 100 stray dogs. Oh, and by the way, she lives in a van with no heat or running water. She spends all her money, and then some, on caring for the animals that society left behind.
It was a good read, written by one our best writers – Ron Jackson – and shot by one of our best photographers/videographers – Chris Landsberger. Good stuff.
But early this morning, we noticed some comments posted at the bottom of the article by visitors who wanted to help Ms. Titus. We tried to find an answer. We were going to do more reporting and post something that gave these people answer.
Alas, “Rick” from Oklahoma City made a comment on NewsOK and beat us to it.
Some good news to report. I talked to Mr. Morrison, husband of Karin Morrison who owns and operates Compassion Seeds Animal Sanctuary. He told me that somebody has donated a trailer to Ms. Titus. He also told me that an account has been setup in the name of Catherine Titus at First Bank & Trust, 301 West Main Street Healdton, OK 73438-2117. The feed Store where Ms. Titus purchases food is WHITENER FEED & SEED 334 REDWOOD ST, WILSON, OK, 73463-6524 God Blesses people like Ms. Titus and Mr. & Mrs. Morrison.
Nice.
The really nice thing is that as of 3 p.m. today, there are 20 comments on this article – not one name as been called and not one subject has been mocked. Or, as “Jeff” from El Reno put it:
I’m glad to see something good has happened as a result of this story. This is what we need more of. Not the arguing and bickering that seems so common place nowadays. To all who lended a helping hand, THANK YOU.
P.S. – We are still tracking down some of what’s been reported in some of the comments. Expect to see an update on this story in the near future.
Commenting functionality gives visitors more control
We silently launched additional functionality on Thursday afternoon that some of our regular visitors noticed almost immediately.
It has to do with our commenting functionality.
Comments on our articles have been very successful for us for a few years now.
We get thousands of comments every day. Most are great. A few aren’t so great. But we don’t want the few to spoil it for the many.
From what I hear from others in the industry, NewsOK.com has been pretty liberal in our allowances on comments on our articles. We want the discussions to be as open as possible. But we are also a mature, grown-up site, so we have to have some laws.
Our Web editors look at every objection made by the masses. They look at them and weigh the issues. If the comment is making an unfair personal attack, uses foul language or is completely off topic, we likely will decide to take the comment off the site. And perhaps just as important as the rules above or in our policy, we ask our editors to use good old-fashioned common sense.
We also make it clear that on some articles, we don’t intend to allow comments. That includes articles on criminal issues or those of a sensitive nature.
For the most part, our visitors who choose to participate in commenting have been outstanding additions to the site. But we’ve seen the ugly side to commenting, as well – those who are participating only to childishly threaten, bully, annoy (or worse).
We’ve addressed issues as we’ve gone forward, and we’re committed to keeping the future of Oklahoma’s No. 1 news and information Web site a place to publicly discuss important issues that affect our community.
So, to make a long story short: Our additional functionality ….
A NewsOK visitor can now choose to ignore comments from specific individuals. In some cases, it might help filter out the noise on some articles. You will always see if comments have been made by visitors you’ve chosen to ignore (and you can read them if you wish), but you will be able to make that choice, now.
This won’t solve everything in the world of message boards, but we hope it helps.
I noticed that some of our regularly comments were rejoicing in the new “Ignore” links they saw on stories, so I know it didn’t go unnoticed.
