1PM Chat at WashingtonPost.Com

[InsultComicDog]

Panel: Ethics & Interactivity

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


As Atrios puts it:

Nothing like convening a panel to discuss how to deal with internet comments which consists of someone who doesn't allow them, someone who doesn't get any because nobody gives a shit what he writes, and someone who deletes them and clearly exaggerates the reasons why.

Oh, and Jane, who we of course love.

[InsultComicDog]

1. Chat log in progress

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

Submit questions and comments before or during the live discussion.

Hamsher is an author and producer who blogs at both firedoglake.blogspot.com and the Huffington Post.

Jarvis, BuzzMachine, is former TV critic for TV Guide and People, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner. He was until recently president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Now he works as editor of a new news startup, still in stealth. He is working with The New York Times Company at About.com on content development and strategy and consulting for Advance and Fairchild.

Rosen, PressThink, teaches journalism at New York University, where has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department. He lives in New York City. He is also the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. He also blogs at the Huffington Post.

Reynolds, Instapundit, is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He is a contributing editor at TechCentralStation.com. His next book, forthcoming in February, is "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths."

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Jim Brady: Just wanted to extend a welcome to our guests in this forum. We've tried to get a good cross-section of folks here to have an open debate on the topic of interactivity on the web. So, without further ado, there are a ton of questions, so let's get cracking...


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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.

Over at Kos, someone compared an archived version of the original comments on the "Maryland Moment" blog with the ones that were restored and found only ten that were deemed so "offensive" that they had to be deleted. That's a 99% civility rate. I think most people who run a public board would think that was remarkable.

That's quite different than the description Brady gave to Hugh Hewitt, where he said there were "hundreds and hundreds of comments about her column, and they were very, very nasty, using words that I didn't even know existed."

Even conservative blogger Michelle Malkin said of the posts deleted from the Howell blog that "the comments seemed comparatively tame."

I think people would really like to know why the Post deleted comments that were really intelligent, appropriate and completely non-profane, and continues to characterize these readers as scruffy barbarians.

Jim Brady: I have made this point countless times, but to no avail. The cached posts you see don't include any of the posts we removed. Simple as that. When we saw them, we took them down, which means they weren't live and thus not on that cached page. So analyzing that page and drawing conclusions is faulty.

Glenn Reynolds: Some examples of good user communities are Slate's "The Fray" (where I started) and Slashdot. Both, however, are moderated.

My own sense is that it's very hard to preserve civility -- or even a good ratio of interestingness to flaming -- on sites that have high traffic without a fair degree moderation. There's some sort of a threshold after which things tend to break down into USENET-style flamewars, which some people like, but which I'm tired of. I find the comments on Atrios, Kos, or for that matter Little Green Footballs, to be tiresome.

Jeff Jarvis: Glenn: I agree with your assessment of those particular sites. I wonder whether that is a function of size or topic or host's tone.

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Columbus Ohio: I think Atrios sums this up pretty well:

"Nothing like convening a panel to discuss how to deal with internet comments which consists of someone who doesn't allow them, someone who doesn't get any because nobody gives a sh** what he writes, and someone who deletes them and clearly exaggerates the reasons why."

Jim Brady: Yeah, that's a terrific analysis. So the point is that the only people qualified to discuss comments on articles are people who allow comments and delete nothing? That would be one heck of a discussion. As for clearly exaggerating, I saw that "analysis." It was of a cached page of one of the two problematic posts, and as I have mentioned a number of times, didn't have any of the posts that we'd removed. If you want to act as it that's proof of clear exaggeration, I think you lose some credibility when you talk about the press and its burden of proof. If The Post had used that burden of proof to show that Abramoff directed money to Democrats, you'd rightfully be all over them.

Jeff Jarvis: Well, then, I'd say that Atrios has a perfect opportunity to come grill a few of the many people he doesn't like.

But seriously, I also believe this is an unfair summary of Atrios' views of interactivity; I doubt he wants his site to become known as a snark factory.

Instead, because he is the host to such robust interactivity and has created a conversation of its own sort, I'd like to hear his perspective.

One BIG problem with this particular means of interactivity is that I see no names! That's not very personal. If Atrios were here, I wouldn't know it. And so I do think it's rather ridiculous that a few of us have names and everyone else does not. That's one of the artificial constraints of this stage-and-auditorim format I have never liked. The truth is that the Post would be well-served to create a means and motive for Atrios and the folks listed here and you to gather and have a good discussion about discussions.

Or we can just snark.

Jane Hamsher: Jim, Jane here. I'm just wondering, did you filter messages before they were seen publicly or after? We know that posts were removed and then restored at various times over the last week. But what is puzzling is that some messages with profanity were restored while others with strictly appropriate political content were not. Can you explain?


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Freeport, Maine: Jim:

I'll throw this question out to you, since I assume you're moderating this panel.

Do you think a dinosaur like The Washington Post is fundamentally unable to cope with something like a blog with comments (a feature commonly absent from Rightie blogs) because it is so used to manipulating the message to its liking?

I realize that question could use an editor, but it's a matter of cultural context; i.e. you're the cart and we're the horse.

Thanks for hosting this gig.

Jim Brady: First of all, I'm not moderating this. Our Live Online honcho, Liz Kelly, is doing the honors and selecting the questions.

As for the question, I don't think being a mainstream media site and having blogs with comments are mutually exclusive. We've been doing it for a year, actually. Of course people from both sides will use those boards to make political points , and that's fine. Others will use the forum to criticize the paper and its reporting. We knew that going in to. So, no, I think these somewhat different cultures can -- and need to -- merge.


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Spokane, Wash.: I learned in First Amendment class that the way to counter bad speech is to allow MORE speech not cut it off as you did with the Howell blog.

Discuss.

Jeff Jarvis: Well said. The age of controlled conversation is over. The age of open conversation is here. But that is damned hard for the controllers to get used to. And I don't say that with the perjorative edge it seems to indicate. The journalists thought it was their job -- emphasis on job, responsibility, value -- to control by verifying and judging and so on. If the job, instead, is to enable, then you have to start exercising new muscles. And it is important to keep in mind that a democracy is better served by the airing of more viewpoints and perspectives. And journalism is better served by the exposing of more news.

Glenn Reynolds: More speech is good. But, of course, there's no obligation for anyone to provide you with more speech on their site.

I love open comments, just as I love free beer, free pizza, and other giveaway goods. But I'm not entitled to them. And those who partake, I think, owe a certain degree of civility to their hosts.

In an age where there's less control, I think that such informal measures matter more, not less.

Jeff Jarvis: When this works best -- when civility rules -- I think it's not so much because people owe that to their host but to the community. I am most gratified when fellow commenters out a troll or ask that a conversation get on topic.

When I oversaw highly interactive sites at Advance.net, we found that if we gave the community the opportunity to snitch on bad behavior, they did... because it was theirs, not ours. (I wrote about yesterday in more detail on my blog.)

Jay Rosen: I think we should start debating not the user's right to speak through comments, but the journalist's right to hear, and discern what users of their work are saying. Who's sticking up for that? Used to be (and many who are working in newsrooms will remember this) that five letters and two phones calls about the article you researched for three weeks was a "big" response. I'd love to hear from the Post journalists who want the far bigger, richer and more varied responses they can get on the Net today, and who have the sense that there might be something valuable in it.

Glenn Reynolds: Bloggers get a lot more feedback, with or without comments. I spoke to Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News at a conference, and found out that I get much more email in a day than her paper gets in a week, and it's a top-ten daily. Of course, reporters might report less if they got as much email as I do.


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Washington, D.C.: Hi, my question is for Glenn and then maybe Jane would like to comment.

Why is it that most of the high traffic right-wing blogs don't take comments, while most of the left-wing blogs do?

From my perspective, it looks like the conservatives can dish it out, but can't take it, that they are uncomfortable subjecting their ideas to scrutiny on their own Web sites.

Jeff Jarvis: Heh.

Glenn Reynolds: I think that one reason has to do with media treatment. Charles Johnson, for example -- who does have comments -- has repeatedly faced media stories about his site in which comments made by his readers are directly attributed to him, as if he had written them. I certainly worry about that sort of thing, too. I think that lefty sites expect, and get, less of that kind of mistreatment.

I've never had comments. I get about 1000 emails a day, and I don't have time to look at those, post on my blog, AND moderate comments. And unmoderated comments raise a risk of the kind of thing I mention above, as well as possible libel and copyright issues. I've actually considered bringing someone in to do that, but that seems too impersonal.

Jeff Jarvis: But, Glenn, isn't it also true that your audience misses out on the wisdom your audience brings to you? Just as I'd tell the Post, the Times, the Guardian, et al, that they should take advantage of -- that is, enable and share -- the wisdom of their crowds, I think your public would be as interesting to read as you are. Of course, I grant that there is a cost that comes with this if you do moderate at your level of traffic v. mine. But I would love to see you find some way to be more interactive. Nick Denton and Gawker Media made that -- appropriate for them -- into a velvet-rope club where you have to be invited in. I wouldn't say that would work for you -- accusations of an echo chamber would follow. But I wonder whether isn't some way to increase your interactivity. But then the question is: Do you want to?

Glenn Reynolds: I don't know. My blog is a spare-time activity for me, and the sort of thing you describe would be another commitment of time. The Washington Post can have editors for their comments; I'd have to do it myself, or hire someone.

I am annoyed, though, by the sense of entitlement that some people bring to this discussion. The barriers to entry in blogging are very low. You want to get your ideas out? You can start a blog in 15 minutes. So why do you feel entitled -- and that's not too strong a word for what I hear sometimes -- to put your comments on someone else's site?



Glenn Reynolds: To add to this, I think that although people often act as if bloggers avoid comments with which they disagree, I think that the real danger to bloggers comes fromthe commenters with whom they agree. I've seen a number of bloggers pushed toward more extreme views by their comment section. It's seductive, I imagine -- all these people talking about *your* ideas -- and it seems to exert a pull.

Jeff Jarvis: I think you're quite right that anyone can have a blog and link and commment and, in many ways, that yields richer conversation. Still, there are times when I have something to add to a conversation and don't want to use my own blog for that. I appreciate the blogs who allow that. Entitlement? No, I'd call it enlightenment.

Glenn Reynolds: In your case, Jeff, it's enlightenment. But you have a blog, and you've presented this question in a non-entitled sense. That's not always the case.

Jeff Jarvis: And we come to agreement. We both complain about people who tell us what they want us to write. Blogs are about what we want to write.


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Woodside, Calif.: Everyone makes mistakes. The easiest thing to do is admit them and move on. A mea culpa would have transformed this "issue." Ms. Howell did not do that. Why?

Jay Rosen: This is one where there's a real lack of communication between the Post and readers who were angry about Howell's errors. Jim Brady's attitude is instead of waiting to reply in her column, she spoke on Thursday at the post.blog, three days before her "scheduled" time. He has also said (in a Q and A with me) that he doesn't think an earlier response would have made any difference.

I disagree with Jim. The Post can say it "only" took four days for Howell to acknowledge something amiss, but it only takes four minutes to realize that she was wrong in what she stated as fact about Abramoff and the Democrats. Moreover, she was wrong in a way that "tracked" with Republican spin, which makes it different from a garden-variety miscue. And on top of that her first statement was begrudging in tone. This created the storm conditions that "stunned" Howell, and lit up the comment board.

From Sunday afternoon to Thursday, then, the Post and Howell were speaking loudly by doing nothing, sending the message "there's nothing amiss," or "we don't hear you," or "just the usual partisan griping." And since these signals from the Post were themselves wrong (there was something amiss, and Brady did hear...) they had the effect of compounding the original error, turning it into an insult felt by many thousands of people, who, as everyone knows, stand on the blue side of the red-blue divide in American politics. That is no disqualification for criticizing the Post.

I don't think you can understand the insults that flew at Howell--and she will never understand them--unless you start with the institutional insult I just described. There's news value for outraged readers in a big non-response. The news for them is: you don't count, even when you have a point. Not answering the criticisms of her Jack Ambramoff column was escalating behavior, and the Post began it immediately.

And so I don't think Jim Brady has punctuated this event correctly.

Jeff Jarvis: See Dan Rather's 11 days. Just because you own distribution no longer means you control the timing of news. Journalists need to learn that the moment they publish is when the story starts, not ends, and they need to gear up to learn more and share more from that moment on.


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Apopka, Fla.: Remember when sex was the number one searched-for term on the Internet? And now, porn is so widely available online that no one really cares anymore. Isn't this fretting over vicious blog posting just "flavor of the month?" A year from now, will anyone care anymore?

Glenn Reynolds: Sure, it's a tempest in a teapot. But it's our teapot!

Jeff Jarvis: And is it really a tempest at all or is that the spin. It's like media saying that there's an uproar over decency on TV when it's an engineered campaign of the so-called Parents Television Council (don't get me started). Is there really an uproar over uncivility in comments or about the paper closing them off? It's all perception. It's all spin. And it's quite inside blogging. How much better it would be to talk about the issues.


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Sample question 2: df dfdf

Jane Hamsher: Jim Brady says "I have made this point countless times, but to no avail. The cached posts you see don't include any of the posts we removed. Simple as that. When we saw them, we took them down, which means they weren't live and thus not on that cached page. So analyzing that page and drawing conclusions is faulty."

Are you saying that these messages, which you are saying you pulled, never appeared on the blog?

Jim Brady: Not at all. They were there and we removed them. And thus they would not appear in a cached page, which is essentially a snapshot in time. If they weren't live at the moment the page was cached, you wouldn't see them.


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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.


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Little Rock, Ark.: Why not establish a set of rules (no profanity or hate speech, yada yada yada) and then have a moderator delete posts that violate the rules? This is how many online discussion boards and forums operate.

Jeff Jarvis: In my experience, most sites do this. But be aware that (1) this brings costs and (2) advertisers do not value forums -- wrongly, I think -- and so they operate at a loss. I said on my blog that interactivity is valuable nonetheless and necessary. But at some point, there is a limit to the investment that business sides tend to want to put into it.


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Logan, Utah: Okay, you want to discuss "the evolving nature of Internet commentary and ethics."

Here are my thoughts:

I know from my experience as a monitor of some volatile and highly-trafficed news-related message boards that people get really mad if you solicit their opinion and then delete it. So, be sure you want comments before you ask for them. To be more blunt, if you don't want people to tell you when you screw up, then leave your comments turned off. That's the ethical thing to do.

However, if you want to create a community of active and involved readers, then comments can help you do that - but you have to value the imput of your readers enough to (a) provide clear guidelines about what is unacceptable content BEFORE they post, not after and (b)consider their words and issue any corrections, clarifications, or retractions before they get the idea that you are ignoring or dissing them.

I would be interested to hear what your panel thinks about this.

Jeff Jarvis: When I the word ethics in the headline of my blog post about this, I did not mean it in terms of unethical behavior -- whether one would want to define that as what Howell did or what commenters did in response.

I was talking about the positive ethic -- how interactivity is good for journalism and democracy.

I believe that the ethic of objectivity in journalism -- which I, among others, argued was a false god -- should be replaced by an ethic of transparency (read: honesty) and interactivity (read: conversation and openness).

OK, that's horribly broad. To be more responsive to your challenge: I agree that asking for views and then not airing them is wrong. And, yes, it feels helpful to have guidelines and rules of engagement. But then again, I have opposed such ethics policies for bloggers because I believe that we don't sign such a piece of paper when we move into our houses: 'I hereby vow not to be an ass to my neighbor.' It is presumed that I will not be an ass until I act otherwise. Similarly, here, in our interactive world, I think we need to presume civility and not manage based on uncivity.

Glenn Reynolds: I think it's very useful to make the guidelines clear up front. Of course, some conduct (e.g. the goatse.cx links on the LA Times site) is pretty obviously out, and no one can claim not to know better. But other stuff is OK on some blogs, not OK on others. It's partly a matter of culture.


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Concord, Mass.: What other criteria, besides profanity, privacy intrusions and hurtful personal attacks, should be used to censor comments?

I noticed that some comments removed from The Washington Post blog last week contained no profanity or personal affront but simply provided background information about the issue at hand or asked about inconsistencies in the graphical evidence that Ms. Howell attempted to provide.

Jane Hamsher: Jim Brady told Jay Rosen, "If you want to take issue with articles in The Post or on washingtonpost.com, go right ahead. If you want to complain that you think we're biased to the left or right -- and, believe me, we get it from both sides -- have at it. But if you want to viciously attack and insult Post or Post.com staffers or other blog commenters, then go somewhere else to do it. That'’s the deal we'’ve had with a large majority of our loyal readers for years, and we've decided that'’s going to be our policy going forward."

It would be interesting to now how this reconciles with the deletion of Paul Lukasiak's and Richard Estes' comments from the Maryland Moment blog, which were pure political commentary and contained neither profanity nor "hate speech".

Much of the profanity has been put back in, but these comments have not. This makes it seem that the Post's goal was to silence intelligent, appropriate political criticism rather than to eliminate what they are complaining so loudly about.


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Anonymous: Could Mr. Brady please tell us what the Washington Post means by the term "hate speech"? I am confused as to how it differs from a personal attack. Does saying I hate Ms. Howell's writing or lack of journalistic integrity qualify as hate speech? The Post seems to be using this term in a political sense; it seems to be something beyond the "personal attacks" or obscene language that The Post also cites as unacceptable within its Comments.

Jane Hamsher: "Hate speech" is a very specific, loaded term, and since the Post has so far refused to release any of the comments that could be thus characterize they insist we take their word for it. Are they referring to what Ed Gillespie calls "hate speech?" There are any number of people who have managed large online communities (though none of them here) who deal with these problems every day. Kos (of DailyKos) says "I would challenge them to release the emails and messages that were so abusive that it gave them the vapors. On DailyKos, hidden comments are still visible to trusted users. Transparency goes a long way toward verifying that censorship is being responsibly managed."

Jay Rosen: I agree with Jane that hate speech is a loaded term.

I also think that there is such a thing as "press hate," and it does fit easily into what's called the paranoid style in American politics. Press hate has, I think, had a very long and active life on the right, but it also has appeal to some on the Left. Maybe more appeal than ever. The reasons for it are many.

How can we tell press hate from just angry passionate criticism? When the journalist's efforts to correct, improve, understand and engage are met with instant rejection and suspicion, there is a climate of press hate. I am not in favor of censoring it. But I am wary of where the emotion leads.

Jeff Jarvis: How does one defuse hate? By facing the bully eye-to-eye, eh?

Nine times out of 10, when someone has come spitting bile at me in my comments, I find that if I bother to address them directly and call them on their behavior toward me, they back off and we end up in a decent conversation.

Frankly, many times -- most times -- it's not worth the effort. It's just a passing moment. But when I take the time, it tends to work.

If Deborah had appeared in the comments immediately asking people to treat her as a person, not a silent oracle, then I'll bet the tone of the exchange would have changed. That's not to say that some would not still be angry and rude but what were they really asking for but answerability? So if you answer, you defuse that demand.


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Madison, Wis.: I would argue that there is a marked difference between communications that contain profanity (uncouth, but common), personal attacks (a sign of anger and frustration), and hate speech (unacceptable in any situation). But, creating a forum that is open for all to comment, as you are doing, will invariably produce some of each. I believe these situations are manageable, as Ms. Hamsher manages to do daily at her blog firedoglake. But, I would strongly encourage you to examine each "situation" in the context of the article or column being commented upon. If a writer's imprecise language or incorrect information leads to errors, correct them immediately. You will earn the trust of your readers and commenters and minimize the negative feedback. This situation is really a lesson in Management 101!

Jay Rosen: It makes sense for the Post to have rules, and it is their right to decide what they should be. Hate speech has to be beyond the pale. Personal attacks with no substance should be. But rules without an enforcement system aren't rules; they're guidelines. I don't think "civility" is an especially good guideline. Jim shouldn't ask people to be civil, but to be real, to say what they think, to obey some minimal rules. Sometimes there's a lot to discern in an angry, uncivil response, but if you're worried about civility you're not going to be very discerning.

Jim Brady: I'd concur with Jay here. I've used the word "civility," but it's true that it's a tough word to define. Among the things we've learned here is that we need to have clear rules and examples to help people understand the limits of what we'll accept. So I'll retire "civility" at this point.

Glenn Reynolds: To take an economic perspective, one problem with comments is that -- like email lists and chatboards -- they allow one person to draw on the time of others. This can quickly devolve into a tragedy of the commons.

Nick Denton said that the great thing about the blogosphere is that it "routes around idiots." If you think someone is a troll, you can stop visiting their blog. (And, obviously, one person's "idiot" is another person's genius, at least sometime). But that's true for the blogosphere as a whole, not for any particular part of it, of course. It's why I like Technorati -- I can see links to a post, and from experience I usually know whose comments aren't likely to be worth reading.

Jeff Jarvis: Glenn: The same is true in comments, though. I route around those whose comments I've not found worthwhile. Yes, ignoring them may only piss them off more. But I find that most get tired and go away.


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Medford, Mass.: Although there has been a lot of distracting noise about civility, it seems to me that the real question in all of this is whether news will be responsive to readers ("interactive" if you prefer). Newspapers have previously had complete editorial control over reader responses -- simply through the choice of whether to publish a reader's letter to the editor. Even those chosen are often further edited.

What The Post just bumped up against was interactive readership. It is certainly more messy and less easy to control, but I do not think old-fashioned, one-way communication can last much longer. The Post should have embraced the response and bragged about in headlines: "Over 1,000 Readers Respond to Ombudsman Column." Missed opportunity to baby step into the future?

Jeff Jarvis: Amen. It's not just about civility but about facts -- about journalism and trust.

And journalists forget at their peril that they are not the ones who decide what is reliable and true and worth credence, in the end: The public is. It is the job of journalists to help them make that decision.

And so the Post doesn't need to clean up the world or decide everything that is or isn't reliable. I know a bozo when I see one. But you're right, rather than dealing with that, we should be talking about the news and the facts. Civility is so high school.

Jim Brady: I assure you, we're not at all interested in cleaning up the world. But we do want people who post on our site to follow some simple guidelines. And, as I have said, you have every right to reject those rules and walk away from us. But I do strongly disagree with the assumption that the web is what it is and we have to accept profanity and public attacks as part and parcel.

One other thing that's been lost in this is that the only reason we ran into this trouble was that we had comments turned on to start with. Many media sites and blogs don't have comments turned on at all. So the irony is that we're having this conversation only because we actually provided interactivity to start with.

I don't know many people in journalism who don't believe in interacting more with readers.

Jeff Jarvis: Oh, I do, I'm sorry to say. But they can learn. I've found that most people who fear or disdain interactivity come to appreciate it. But first, they have to give it a chance. The Post has clearly gotten people to try and learn to love to interact. Sadly, many newsrooms still cower at the thought.


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Boston, Mass.: For Jim Brady: First, I want to thank you for have the gumption/integrity to engage critics in an open discussion. I have strong respect for your interview on Air America recently, although I want to follow up on the issue of reporting that is factually correct but gives a false impression.

If I had a friend who spent $240 a year subscribing to The Post and $0 buying the Washington Times in 2000, and I successfully encouraged him to buy the Times on weekdays and limit his purchase of The Post to Sundays for $78, it is factually correct that I encouraged him to spend money on both newspapers. Do you agree that reporting that I "directed him to spend money on both newspapers" would give a false impression of my role in supporting the Washington Post?

Jim Brady: No, I think in that case, you didn't direct him to. But I don't think the situations are at all analagous. I don't want this to get into a discussion about the Abramoff story, though. Deborah has admitted an error in her phrasing, both online and in the paper, and this issue has been discussed endlessly for the last week. I'm reasonably sure that no matter what I say, we'll end up agreeing to disagree.

Jane Hamsher: I think it's a very fair analogy.

On Chris Cillizza's washingtonpost.com blog, he recently mentioned that despite his decision to only deal with scandals plaguing current governors and members of Congress, an editor stepped in and added to his list Rep. Frank Ballance, a Democrat who had resigned in June, 2004. Even Cillizza himself said that "Ballance was unnecessarily included for, frankly, balance."

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.


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Scottsdale, Ariz.: Your announcement of this panel says you shut down the blog "after several comments containing personal attacks, profanity and hate speech were posted..." But a Post article titled "Deluge Shuts Down Post Blog" (Jan 21) said the paper shut the blog "after receiving hundreds of posts, many using profane or sexist language."

Which was it, several or many?

washingtonpost.com: Deluge Shuts Down Post Blog, (Post, Jan. 21)

Jim Brady: Many.

Jane Hamsher: There is a big difference between "several" and "hundreds." Is it a "dozen" as Strauss said, or "hundreds" as Brady said in the Hugh Hewett interview?

I think Jim Brady owes us some specifics.

Jim Brady: I don't know the exact number, but I can assure you it was more than dozen. I removed about 50 myself.

And, Jane, since you obviously don't want to discuss the topic at hand and would instead prefer to play Columbo, let me pose a question to you: I looked at your blog last night in preparation for this, and in addition to all the nice things you had to say about me, I noticed that you often link to "WaPo" articles that are critical of the Bush Adminstration and give them your implied endorsement. But then when we publish something that doesn't fit into your worldview, we're called "shills of the GOP." Which is it? You can't have it both ways, but you seem to want to.

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New York, N.Y.: How was this panel selected? Why did The Post include Glenn Reynolds, whose Web site doesn't include comments? Why does Mr. Reynolds not allow comments on his site?

Jim Brady: It seems if you're having a discussion panel on a topic, you ought to get people who represent different viewpoints. Glenn doesn't allow comments, we do but have decided to set rules and Jane allows anyone to post anything. Jeff and Jay are both respected observers of Web culture. Seems like a pretty well-rounded panel to me. If we'd only allowed people who allow comments, there wouldn't have been as much to debate.


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Mackinaw, Ill.: Why not just have verified registration required for commenters?

Jeff Jarvis: But there have been many times when I've wanted to add something to a discussion (which sounds better than merely commenting, eh?) and did not because of the speed bump of having to register. So that affects the value of the conversation. And even if people do register, it's no guarantee they will not (or should not) offend or cannot create identities for the sake of snarking. Personally, I do give more credence to comment from those who put their name behind what they say -- which is why I also value it when people take up their own space on their own blogs under their own names to comment.


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New York, N.Y.: Mr Brady,

Ms Hamsher has remarked on her blog that the notion that your comments section could be taken down by inappropriate speech ("trolls" as she puts it) is very difficult to credit. It's very difficult to believe that a site as well-designed and well-managed as washingtonpost.com did not anticipate and plan for this problem, which has haunted online discussions from the very beginning of the UseNet. Do you really think that people buy this story?

Jim Brady: Well, it should be noted that we've had message boards for years, and blogs for about a year, so we have been doing this for a while. But we've never really had any problems with this kind of flurry of problematic posts, so it's probably fair to say we were not prepared for it, either technically or from a human resource standpoint. If you don't believe that's the reason we shut it down, I doubt anything I say here will change your mind.

Jay Rosen: Since the age of interactivity began, Big Media companies have had a tendency to set up forums where the readers can play by themselves-- without intervention, or added costs. "Here's where you can have your say" is the tip off. But eventually an unmoderated forum is going to cause trouble. And what users want is not just to have their say, but also to be listened to. When they sense that is not happening, the forum is in trouble.