WP Chat about how they deal with The Great Unwashed @ 1pm ET

[Rose Siding]

Josh Marshall comments on upcoming chat:
"Bring soap in case you need to wash your mouth out."




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/01/24/DI2006012400817.html

snip>
Last Thursday, washingtonpost.com turned off the reader comments feature on post.blog, a blog dedicated to sharing news by and about The Post and washingtonpost.com. The move came after several comments containing personal attacks, profanity and hate speech were posted on an item about Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's recent column about the Abramoff scandal: Getting the Story on Jack Abramoff, (Post, Jan. 15). At the time, washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady wrote, "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." Brady discussed the decision in a live discussion last week.

To open the discourse about how reader-submitted comments should be handled, washingtonpost.com has invited several prominent bloggers to join us Wednesday, Jan. 25, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss the evolving nature of Internet commentary and ethics.

The Panel: Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine; Jane Hamsher, firedoglake; Jay Rosen, PressThink; Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit; and Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com.

submit question or comment-
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/content/submit_wpni1.htm


actual photo caption:
"In liberal films, unionists, strikers, and labor leaders are not inherently bad, as they are in conservative films. They are just incapable of offering calm responses to crisis situations. When the rightfully angered miners protest, their protests come in the form of an unorganized, unthinking mob of angry men and women (fig. 115)."

[Rose Siding]

1. They used my question

omagosh :blush: First one:

snip>
ME! :) --->Seattle, Wash.: The Post's dramatic over-reaction to some critics has, in effect, broadly painted all Democrats on the left as vulgar. Last night, one of the sillier TV pundits characterized blog reaction to Howell's column as "organized terrorism." What can The Post do to tamp down this sort of dangerous mischaracterization, and how can readers who care enough to participate in the dialogue trust that they won't again all be treated as barbarians when they disagree?

Jeff Jarvis: That's a great point. To extend the argument, this chat itself is looking at the wrong end of the pipe. It would be better to have a chat about all the great things that do, indeed, come from finally opening up the pipe to two-way collaboration. NashvilleIsTalking.com is my favorite example of a media organization forging a new relationship with citizens by sharing (1) conversation, (2) promotion, (3) content, (4) knowledge, and -- this is a big one -- (5) revenue.

Yes, let's chat next about the light side of interactivity, damnit.

Jay Rosen: I think it would have been wise if Deborah Howell, in her latest piece, "The Firestorm Over My Column," had elected to share with readers not only the rude, crude and disgusting things sent her way, but some of brilliant and inspired ones that made her think, caused her to question herself, or introduced problems she had never considered before. She said she had suffered "a public stoning," but she was also treated to a live seminar on the politics of balance in the news columns, and the complaints of a newly-assertive online left. Did she learn anything from it beyond: I have to watch what I say?

Jane Hamsher: The post.com should be thrilled by the passion and intelligence and civility exhibited by the vast, vast majority of commenters.

.....MORE.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/01/24/DI2006012400817.html

[Rose Siding]

2. Of Rosen's answer, in fact, the only exchange Howell referenced at ALL

was one in which the commenter wrote back APOLOGIZING. She never reached out at ALL to the "vast, vast majority" as Jane calls us.

[Rose Siding]

3. Jane (fdl) is loaded for bear and Brady's getting snippy

Jim Brady: Jane, if anything with profanity was restored, it was inadvertent. As for the ones that you say were removed that did not violate any of our rules, I'd need to read them. If indeed there are some that fit that category we can put them back up. But let's be real here, there are almost 1,000 comments up under Maryland Moment now and almost 200 on Deborah's clarification, and they're almost all pretty critical of The Post. So to pull out a handful of examples and try and turn that into a huge conspiracy is a bit of a stretch.

[Rose Siding]

4. She gets in a good point here

I'm worried that her single mindedness on this one (relevant) question is making it too easy for him to portray her as aggressively belligerent.

but then she cuts loose:

snip>
Prior to the fall of 2005 nobody would have suggested that Abramoff was anything other than a self described "right wing idealogue" and a GOP operative, a man who once famously said, "it is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently." Suddenly the GOP and the president himself began calling Abramoff an "equal money dispenser" and there is every appearance that the paper's management are going to great lengths to support this distortion.

What you are seeing on your message boards is only the tip of the iceberg of the crisis of trust the paper has created with its readership, and people are quite understandably and justifiably angry when these concerns are dismissed as invalid because a few of them are found to be "uncivil." This is so beside the point as to be absurd.