Newspaper Shuts Down Controversial Feedback Platform

from la times

Newspaper Shuts Down Controversial Feedback Platform
By Fred Alvarez, Times Staff Writer

Bombarded with abusive online postings, a Ventura County newspaper has pulled the plug on a virtual platform that allowed readers to comment on stories that appear on its website.

Thousands of readers of the Ventura County Star have sounded off on stories since the newspaper launched the service in January as a way of connecting with the community, said John Moore, the paper's assistant managing editor for new media and technology.

But in too many instances, Moore said topic threads spun out of control, with posters using profanity and injecting vicious commentary on everything from race to immigration.

The newspaper suspended the online comments on Wednesday, although Moore said he hopes to soon resurrect them with tighter controls.

"All of us were sad we had to shut it down at all," said Moore, noting he had noticed a surge of nasty, off-topic comments in recent weeks. "We didn't have the staff to spend 24 hours a day watching this and we didn't want to have to spend our time doing that."

Newspapers across the country are wrestling with similar issues amid calls for more transparency in the news gathering process and greater public participation.

It is still rare for newspapers to permit the kind of public commentary on individual stories allowed by the Ventura County Star, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington D.C.-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But more and more, Rosenstiel said, news organizations are looking for ways to connect with readers and get them to invest in stories and news events, often as they are occurring.

"I think that generally it's fair to say that journalism and the way that people gain information is becoming less of an organized lecture through the media and more of an open dialogue in which citizens are active participants," Rosenstiel said. "I think that's utterly in keeping with the larger purpose of journalism, which is to inspire debate."

The newspaper posted a long statement explaining its decision.

"We started the comments in January…Wonderful conversations ensued. Readers began talking with each other, offering opinions, raising the bar of discourse in the county. They were voices we didn't normally hear from.

"The comments made many of us a little nervous. They were a little raw for our taste; language and opinions that we don't normally see in print. But they were real. For awhile.

"Very quickly, race become the common theme on many of the topic threads…

"The viciousness of the comments began to escalate. We found more and more of our time was being spent moderating the comments. With comments posted on dozens of stories, it ate up much of our day….

"And it also showed the unfortunate underbelly of the Internet. The anonymity offered by the Internet on comments like this seems to encourage people to say the meanest, ugliest things about other people."