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Online comments on stories

We've had another backlash at our paper regarding online comments on the articles we publish online. We ran two stories (both written by me) that stirred a lot of emotion and angry responses. I've had more than one reader ask me why we allow comments on such controversial stories. One involved a middle school teacher being placed on leave for possibly touching a student inappropriately, the other a drug bust where we ran a photo of a toddler being carried out of the residence.
Our policy has been to only moderate the comments for the possibility that someone has written something highly offensive, obscene, libelous, etc. Probably the same policy many of you have at your news source. I'm just wondering people's thoughts on this issue. Should comments on news stories be totally untouched? If they're moderated, to what degree? Or are blogs and the discussions they spark expected to replace direct news story comments?

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Comment by Sarah Corbitt on February 15, 2008 at 1:54pm: So, you wanna take the task/credit and create (what I'm sure will be the wildly popular) Comments on Stories Group?
:)

Comment by maria p. gonzalez on February 15, 2008 at 1:52pm: Hey Sarah, you're right, this post was a blog of mine, on my personal page. It was displayed on the main page for a while but got bumped down as other members posted other blogs. There is a Blogging group where members have talked some about online comments, but comments on blogs, not news stories.

Comment by Sarah Corbitt on February 15, 2008 at 1:26pm: Maybe I'm clumsy on this thing, but I wanted some of my colleagues to join this conversation, and I looked thru Groups and couldn't find this. I guess this is a blog. How can other folks find this? I've supplied a couple of them with the URL when I realized it wasn't a Group, but perhaps we should be? Then more folks could join this conversation. Just a thot. Maybe we're not a group...

Comment by Sarah Corbitt on February 8, 2008 at 11:24am: I'd advise keeping the report abuse button universally visible to all users, but requiring registration - even as minimal as a username and e-mail - to actually report a comment as abusive. We've had to shut down comments on stories not just for problematic comments, but because users were spamming our editors with abuse reports by hitting the button literally hundreds of times a day.

Comment by Henry Howard on February 8, 2008 at 11:16am: A good way to monitor the comments is to include a "report abuse" button with each post. That way users can report posts that may or may not needed to be taken down. By clicking on the "report abuse" button an e-mail is sent to an editor(s) with authority to remove the post, if warranted.
It sure beats spending hours each day reading all the forums.

Comment by Wendy Withers on February 8, 2008 at 11:08am: Comment moderation can be important for a newspaper site, but it's necessary to write what your editorial policy for comments is. Make sure you have a page that spells out exactly what you do and don't accept and make sure a link to that page is placed next to the comment box. I'm not sure what your comment system is like, but I think it's also important to have some level of disclosure for the comments, so the paper at least knows the email address of the person who made the comment.

The most important thing is to include all comments that meet the criteria your paper has set in place, to screen comments based on personal opinion about them is unethical. No one should be saying "Well, this technically fits in to our allowed comment range, but the response isn't intelligent, so I'm going to block the comment."

Comment by Brian Cubbison on February 3, 2008 at 1:20am: We get raw voices you don't expect to hear in a family newspaper. We also get this kind:

"Hello and Thank you for the kind thoughts and prayers for jimmy and our family. To start, we can never thank all the kind people who have reached out to our family during our loss of jimmy. A great big Thank You to Hart Seely for being more then just a reporter. We consider him a great friend now and always will. Cody, a friend and HERO, our prayers are with you always and we know jimmy is watching over you now and all our other great men and women who are putting their lives in danger to help make Iraq and our world a safer place to live in. Joshua, our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family during your difficult time of recovery. You are and always will be a HERO and a son to us. To the 1SG wife, Thank you so much for your prayers and kind words. Please tell your TOP that our prayers and thoughts are with him and all his men and women of the 4/64th. Again to all the many others, Thank You so much for your thoughts, prayers and kind words. Judy & Jerry Hoffman"

More here.

Comment by Carlos Virgen on January 29, 2008 at 12:42am: I work with Maria and we had an issue a few months ago with a story about a local police officer who was accused of misconduct while on duty and that really brought out a lot of obscene/hateful comments. After that incident we decided to "pre-screen" the comments before posting them and to also clarify our guidelines/rules for comments.

We saw a drastic decrease in the amount of comments once we started "pre-screening." After a cooling period we decided to allow all comments to be posted without pre-screening. We did not announce the change in policy. Since then we have seen the number of comments steadily increase.

Now we are back in a situation with some controversial stories and we've begun to see some questionable comments. I tend to agree with Brian. Despite the occasional questionable comment the vast majority of the comments are at worst benign, at best constructive. I wish our current website gave us more choices as to how to deal with comments. One of the many frustrations I have with TownNews. I wish we could promote comments which I think would give people some incentive to post intelligent comments using their real names. Since we don't have that option I really believe that our best strategy is to moderate the comments after they have been posted as difficult as that may be sometimes.

Comment by maria p. gonzalez on January 28, 2008 at 11:47pm: I should add that we do take down comments from time to time. It just seemed that with the latest stories, we have been dealing with more of those comments that dance between plain ignorance and something much worse.

Comment by Anthony Plascencia on January 28, 2008 at 9:01pm: I like to think that we at VenturaCountyStar.com have a pretty good handle on the whole moderating situation, but even we don't have a perfect system.

We're pretty strict about personal attacks not being allowed, but when it comes to "offensive" versus "opinion," things are a little tougher to distinguish. When we see comments that might lead to heated exchanges, we make it a point to keep a closer eye on the thread, but we almost never turn off comments completely.

Whenever we've had to turn off comments in the past, it was for a good reason. But it almost always lead to heated phone calls from the public and accusations of bias.

Over time, most of our readers have learned to respect the rules, but only because we have an effective way to moderate with comment removals and outright bans.

I've seen some bloggers make the case for requiring users to use their real names and I've read some pretty good rebuttals, but all in all, I don't that there is a perfect way to deal with moderation.

I will say that without some type of moderation or crowd control, comments have the potential to do far more harm to your organization's reputation than good.