Salon: The Readers Strike Back

A great piece by Gary Kamiya in Salon today discusses some of the trials and tribulations of media outlets that allow and/or encourage comments on their sites and blogs. Within the alternative newsweekly world, this is a point of consternation among editors and writers who traditionally have relied on strong Letters to the Editors pages to get feedback from their readers while maintaining a certain aloof journalistic superiority. Our experience at the JFP has been that conversations can devolve into ad hominem attacks and worse, and the result has been a registration process for comments and a relatively short leash by our online editors. One concern for alt-weeklies in particular is that the more no-holds-barred tone of the editorial can lead readers who want to comment to have the same sort of attitude in comments, which can make for lively discussion, but can also muck it up for everyone who wants to take a topic seriously.

Two interesting points Gary makes:

For a writer, this huge, suddenly vocal audience has some significant advantages. For one thing, it serves as an enormous fact-checker. If you make a mistake in a piece, some eagle-eyed reader will let you know, often within minutes. But a far more important effect of the reader revolution is that it has forced writers to immediately deal with substantive arguments and critique. Like most writers who publish a lot online, I've written pieces that a letter writer has sliced up so surgically, with such superior logic and style, that I began searching furtively for a "do over" button on my computer. And the sheer quantity of even less sophisticated arguments, like water poured onto a leaky roof, reveal a piece's weak points. Many writers have told me about extraordinary e-mail exchanges with readers that sometimes develop into ongoing relationships.

We've seen that in spades, with the leads and expertise leading directly to new, informed pieces for the paper and the site.

The other, less appealing side:

Open letter forums create and abet an insider-ish mentality where a certain species of poster can flaunt their egos and sense of superiority. These worthies may see themselves as keen-witted literary arbiters, but in fact they more closely resemble the extras who play outraged townspeople in low-budget vampire movies, oafs in lederhosen milling around angrily and waving burning torches. Besotted with their petty power and egging each other on, they often gang up on a single demonized writer.

This happens, too. And in the interest of democratic media, you don't want to take this stuff down unless you have to, even if it's attacking you or your writers, because you want to be open and democractic, etc.

The answer? So far, our answer has been to *do it* and *police it*. Give readers the forums for semi-anonymous posting -- they have to register with a valid e-mail address -- and then let them know when they're breaking the terms of your reader agreement. Ours is pretty simple -- no ad hominem attacks, stay on topic, add to the discussion. It's our site, and while we don't have an obligation to take something down, we can if we must.

And then there's the TrollBlog which we created to move particularly egregious trolls to their own little corner of the site for people's consideration and/or amusement. We haven't had to use it much, but it's seemed to have something of an effect on the level of discourse we can get on the site.