NYT Business Section on WP ombudsman, online "feedback" issue

[DeepModem Mom]

David Carr
Soothe the Blog and Reap the Whirlwind
Published: January 23, 2006


....Newspapers like The (Washington) Post and The New York Times present a large, juicy target for dissent from both the right and the left. Finding an appropriate way to feature and moderate comments from the reading public is challenging not just for the old-line media, but for many of the Web's most robust destinations, including Craigslist, BoingBoing.net, Huffington Post and Lucianne.com.

Feedback, as any rock guitarist can tell you, is not always a pleasant-sounding thing. The trouble with a community built of one-way e-mail messages posing as two-way communication is that when people can say anything, they frequently do - a fact of digital life that goes back to The Well, the pioneering online community that presaged the potential and the potential pitfalls of digital social discourse beginning in 1985.

If the first e-mail message did not flame the recipient, the response probably did. There is a kind of permission that hangs over the keyboard along with anonymity that often leads to more over-the-top argument than reasoned exposition.

It is not a site-specific problem," said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. He pointed out that the newspaper had many active discussions on other parts of the site, but that the signal-to-noise ratio in the post.blog discussion had deteriorated to the point that two Post employees could not keep up with filtering responses....

***

The blowback is hardly without precedent, but it is worth noting that much of it came from the left. Flaming and invective know no ideology, but there is a tendency toward seeing a growing conspiracy behind every ill-chosen word - something once thought to be the province mainly of conservatives....


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/business/media/23carr.html

[wryter2000]

1. For pity's sake

The issue isn't the response. The issue is that the Post was repeating a lie as the truth. Then, they defended the lie. They're supposed to be a newspaper. When they say something untrue, they're supposed to retract it, not defend it and then act like the victim when their readers get angry.

[no_more_rhyming]

2. Or fire the editor and the staff like CBS did.