Tag Archives: commenting

Journalism can’t be a one-way street anymore

I don’t know who made up the rule that news reporters aren’t supposed to respond to public comments about and critiques of their work. Maybe it’s not even a rule. Maybe its one of those arbitrary rules that somebody thought was a good idea once upon a time, though it really had no basis in [...]
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Responding to readers by proxy

After reading a story on the Billings Gazette’s Web site about a woman who spent several months living in a sandstone cave above the city, I perused the story’s comments. This was among them: My question is, why didn’t the reporter respond himself? If there’s a policy preventing him from doing so, why does the paper [...]
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What makes an online community?

Dan asked a good question this morning. It stemmed from Jodi’s story about the woman who lost her money-filled purse in a Bozeman parking lot and had it returned by a Good Samaritan. Dan noted that while our Web copy had only one comment, the pared-down AP version on the Billings Gazette’s Web site had [...]
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A cooling off period in Bloomington, Ill.

Okay, this is the wrong way to build a civil community on your newspaper’s Web site. Just before the new year, the staff at the Pentagraph in Bloomington, Ill., decided that the comments on its stories were too uncivil, so the paper took its ball and went home: Reader comments on Pantagraph.com often are informative, [...]
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Comment moderation: How far is too far?

Matthew Ingram has a short post up about a comment moderation decision made by Kurt Greenbaum at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In short, Greenbaum made a call to the system administrator behind an IP address that left two vulgar comments. As a result, the commenter lost his job. It’s a post that’s sparked some fascinating questions [...]
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