By
Bob SteeleThe Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values
I recently spent a couple of days trying to help people in
The (Cincinnati) Enquirer newsroom come to terms with ethical challenges that affect journalists almost everywhere in this cyber era.
How do you honor the values of accuracy and fairness when immediacy and speed are new priorities? How do you protect the credibility of the journalism when you deploy more reporters to breaking news? How do you guard the integrity of the newspaper when online journalism looks so different? Are the values different for how stories are judged? Are the sensibilities different for how readers react to the content online compared to the paper?
Nowhere are those questions of values and sensibilities trickier than in the area of online comments by readers. Our spirited discussion at The Enquirer echoed themes from a recent piece by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell.
(I talked to Howell about her column and the reaction it provoked for a recent Poynter podcast.)
Tom Grubisich explored similar issues, also in the Post.
In our conversations at The Enquirer, some staffers championed the value of freewheeling online comments from the public. Others expressed concern about the consequences of comments that run from roughshod to racist.
After the workshops, I asked two of the Cincy editors to weigh in on these matters in an e-mail Q&A with me. They offered insight on some of the high and low points so far in their experience with inviting readers to comment -- about content on both the newspaper's main site and on a newer, more narrowly focused site.
Tom Callinan has responsibility for The Enquirer newspaper and online news coverage at
Cincinnati.com:
What is your sense of the pros and cons of encouraging the public to post comments to online forums and/or to story comments/chats?
Inviting readers to partner in the news has upsides and downsides. Here's an example of crowd-sourcing that serves the public interest:
Recently, we broke a story online about persistent power problems in a suburban township. The reporter asked readers to help report the story with power issues and got dozens of useful comments. The story received more than 10,000 page views -- and the utility company heard from the public about paying attention to the problem.
Among the 40,000 township residents affected by the frequent outages was a 49-year-old woman whose life depends on using a home kidney dialysis machine 10 hours a day. She received an apology from the president of the energy company, and a local firm that specializes in protecting local companies from unreliable power contacted her and donated a $6,000 uninterruptible power system in her home.
That clearly served the public interest. But less desirable are occasions when flamers post racist, profane or insensitive comments.
What are the competing values at stake when we create these forums?
We need to balance the public interest with our need to build audience online. While discussions about controversies and celebrities may get more traffic, we have a responsibility to invite people in to talk about important issues that may not be as sexy.
That said, readers will participate in constructive dialogue about civic issues if we put a bit of thinking into how we present issues to them. A good example was a recent online discussion about downtown's "missing ingredients." More than 180 readers contributed to a "wish list" and the conversation attracted 13,500 page views.
How has this worked for The Enquirer? When do the public forums/story comments work well? Do you encounter ethical challenges? When? How do you address them?
The comments on the story about the woman who was killed by a drunken driver in a bar parking lot showed how coarse online anonymous posts can become. The verbal assault on her (why would she be out at 2 a.m. on a school night, etc.) had to be very hurtful to her family. The bigger issue with that situation is that we had put standards in place that would have said "no" to enabling conversation on that story. We had been steering away from stories that we could predict would bring out the worst in people ... and top editors all agreed that decision should have been cleared. Obviously our system failed us, so we went to a default "no" on story discussions until we can get a better system in place and more clearly define and communicate standards.
We still are seeing good traffic from chats that we can monitor -- the story about a local restaurateur who refused to serve O.J. Simpson in Louisville, for example, drew hundreds of comments and 67,000 page views. But we are being selective and not just turning conversation on every story without the ability to keep an eye on the comments.
What specific protocols and procedures have you put in place to facilitate the most productive online conversations? What can other news organizations learn from your experiences in this territory?
We find it best when we carefully choose the topic, require registration and then moderate the discussion. Even anonymous posters tend to be more civil when they have to do any sort of registration to join and know we and their fellow posters are watching.
That may cost us some traffic but we need to be comfortable with the conversation, and I still believe readers have higher expectations of online discussions hosted by our business than they see elsewhere in cyberspace.
Karen Gutiérrez is managing editor for one of The Enquirer's offshoot products, a Web site called cincyMOMS.com:
What is your sense of the pros and cons of encouraging the public to post comments to online forums and/or to story chats? How has this worked for cincyMOMS.com? When do the public forums for comments work well?
Public forums work well when you have a diverse group of people participating, because the different personalities tend to balance each other out. Some people become leaders, others agitators, others a calming presence. We run the gamut of moms -- emotional, brainy, single, married, impulsive, measured, funny, long-winded, etc. The mix is very important. Forums can get out of control when they attract, say, mostly ideologues who drown out the other voices. I did some viral marketing through e-mail when we launched the site, and I tried to inform a wide variety of moms about the site with this in mind.
Also, I choose my top headlines on the site very carefully. Early on I put topics there that would appeal to a diverse group of moms. One time I promoted a playgroup for African-American moms. Another time a group for the moms of children with autism. It's important to send these signals that the conversations are for everyone.
I have also learned to write headlines about controversial conversations in a way that invites thoughtful response, as opposed to knee-jerk crazy stuff. Today [May 17], for instance, one of our headlines links to a discussion on the site about teenagers who wear very baggy pants in an apparent imitation of "prison culture," as one mom wrote. This is the type of thing that could get out of hand on forums with a certain audience.
The discussion has been going on for a while and has been very respectful, with moms even suggesting reading material on the issue, so I felt it was safe to link to. My headline was "What baggy pants say about teenagers," and the photo shows only pants from the waist down, so the race of the teenager is not visible. The teaser under the photo says, "Moms discuss the origin of the baggy-pants phenomenon. Cardamom suggests reading Cora Daniels' Ghettonation."
You can see the discussion here.
Do you encounter ethical challenges? When and how do you address them?
There are certainly a lot of challenges for me, but I'm not sure they're ethical ones per se, in the sense that I'm wrestling with how to do the right thing, or anything. Here's an example: I've had two daycare centers object to posts made about their centers and call me. I have read those posts, agreed they were unfair and taken them down. It didn't feel like an ethical quandary to me. I e-mailed the posters to explain what I was doing and told them it's best to stick with the facts when they're posting. None have complained or tried to re-post anything. The centers seemed pleased with how it was handled. (Promptness is very important.) One director told me he reads the site precisely to see if people are posting information they might not want to tell him directly. It's as if he uses the site to see what he needs to fix about his business. Considering that we have 50,000 messages on the site, we've had remarkably few complaints of this sort.
My challenge is more along the lines of managing personalities and mediating disputes so that people continue to feel good about the site and continue to visit. Sometimes moms will e-mail me to say that a discussion has gotten out of hand or become "childish" and that I should weigh in or even lock the discussion to further posts. This is almost always because people have gotten very passionate about a subject and have started to call each other names instead of sticking to the issues, which is to be expected. I will usually wait a while to see if any of our regular posters add something to redirect the conversation. And then eventually I will post something to calm everyone down. On two or three occasions I have locked posts to further comment with a note at the bottom explaining why.
What specific protocols and procedures have you put in place for cincyMOMS.com to facilitate the most productive online conversations?
One thing we've done is require full registration -- name, e-mail and mailing address -- in order to make posts. It's important that people jump through some hoops first, to cut down on script kiddies and others who are just making trouble.
One of my other policies is to answer all e-mail promptly and personally. I would probably read a cincyMOMS feedback e-mail before I would read one from our publisher. This helps me stay on top of conversations so that I'm not too far behind if there's a controversy. Personal customer service also helps people develop an attachment to the site. They get protective of it, which cuts down on irresponsible posting.
We've said all along that this site belonged to the moms themselves. We wanted them to feel in control, talking about what they want to talk about, as opposed to having content dictated to them by the newspaper. So I follow the moms' lead. I do ask my colleagues and bosses for advice when I have a tough issue to mediate. But I'm not sure that any protocol or procedure could anticipate some of the situations that happen on forums, and a protocol that works well in one instance wouldn't work well in another. This is an evolving venture for us, though, so I'm sure more procedures will develop as we learn more about what we need.
