Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:15:57 -0500
From: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [IP] Washington Post.Blog Editors Turne Off Comments due
to nastiness
Begin forwarded message:
From: Alice Kehoe <a.kehoe2@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 23, 2006 7:41:30 PM EST
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/2006/01/
shutting_off_co.html
Comments Turned Off
As of 4:15 p.m. ET today, we have shut off comments on this blog
indefinitely.
At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue
about this site, the events of the day, the journalism of The
Washington Post Company and other related issues. Among the things
that we knew would be part of that discussion would be the news and
opinion coming from the pages of The Washington Post and
washingtonpost.com. We knew a lot of that discussion would be
critical in nature. And we were fine with that. Great journalism
companies need feedback from readers to stay sharp.
But there are things that we said we would not allow, including
personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a
significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused
to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to
allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to
this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web
culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able
to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people
feel strongly (and differently) about.
We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public
dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to
think more carefully about how we do it. Any thoughtful feedback on
that (or any other issue) is welcome, and you can send it to
executive.editor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks,
Jim Brady
Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com
UPDATE, 7 p.m.: As you might expect, we're getting a ton of e-mail on
this, and while I can't answer those e-mails individually, I'll
address the two main points being made, that 1) we're afraid of being
criticized and, 2) that were no personal attacks, profanity or hate
speech in any of the comments.
On the first point, washingtonpost.com has done an awful lot to be as
transparent as possible. We've started a ton of blogs, we've linked
out to bloggers who are writing (often negatively) about Post content
and we've made journalists from The Post and post.com available to
answer questions online on a daily basis. So I find it hard to make a
case that we're unwilling to be criticized. What we're not willing to
do is allow the comments area to turn into a place where it's OK to
unleash vicious, name-calling attacks on anyone, whether they are
Post reporters, public figures or other commenters. And that's
exactly what was happening. That leads into the second complaint. The
reason that people were not routinely seeing the problematic posts I
mentioned were that we were trying to remove them as fast as we could
in order to preserve the reasoned arguments many others were making.
We removed hundreds of these posts over the past few days, and it was
becoming a significant burden on us to try and keep the comments area
free of profanity and name-calling. So we eventually chose to turn
off comments until we can come up with a better way to handle
situations like this, where we have a significant amount of people
who refuse to abide by the rules we set out.
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