The Context

On Sunday, I published my second story about Montana Opticom’s $64 million stimulus award to bury fiber-optic cable in Gallatin County. Many local companies questioned the government’s decision to award the money, enough that it prompted a follow-up story.

Beneath that story, two commenters posted comments critical of one of the companies mentioned in the article. I’m not going to tell you which one. You can figure that out for yourself if you really want to, and besides, the company’s name is not really important to the ethical issues at hand.

One of the commenters was angry with the service he was receiving from the company, saying that it was the only company he had available in his area. The other commenter posted details of the broadband plans available to him through the company.

The Request

This morning, I watched two “report as abuse” e-mails come into my e-mail inbox, flagging both of these comments as “abuse.” By the e-mail address, I could tell that the person doing the flagging was an employee of the company.

Sure enough, a few minutes later I received an e-mail from the same person asking me to remove the comments because they were incorrect.

To provide some more context, I must in fairness say that we had, on a past story, removed a comment at the company’s request because it was, a different employee of the company said, incorrect.

In retrospect, that was the wrong thing to do.

After some consideration and some consultation with Managing Editor Nick Ehli, we determined that it was best not to remove the comments at this time.

Judging by the wording of the e-mail and the fact that it included my previous e-mail conversations about the first takedown, it was clear that the employee saw these two comments as an extension of the earlier situation.

There are 2 comments on the “Money well spent?” article that need to be removed as well.

The idea that these new comments would be un-published seemed routine, a matter of course.

It wasn’t.

Removing one comment at the request of a business named in the comment did not seem like a large issue at the time, but as we learned this morning, it opened a door that should have been left shut.

The Rationale

The Chronicle has, since it started allowing readers to comment on online stories, been concerned with the law behind it. Some editors of newspaper websites worry that the paper can become liable for comments.

This isn’t true. The video below explains it pretty well.

The crux lies in the Communications Decency Act, specifically Section 230c, “Protection of Good Samaritan Blocking and Screening of Offensive Content.” That part of the law says:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In other words, websites are not liable for material posted there by others. The original poster may be liable, but not the owner of the website.

So much for the law, how about our Terms of Service? Let’s get this straight first:

The Websites reserve the right to suspend or terminate your access to and use of The Websites if, in our view, your conduct fails to meet any of the following guidelines or for any reason whatsoever, within our complete and absolute discretion.

Got it?

Next, our terms say that “users shall not provide any information that is false, misleading or inaccurate.” Of course we don’t want false information on the site, especially if it is put there purposefully. And I’ll make it clear that I believe this particular conduct rule in our terms is talking about purposeful falsity — lying.

How about our commenters? Are they lying or are they just wrong? Is the Chronicle to take the word of a faceless e-mail message with a clear agenda over a faceless commenter whose motives are unclear?

As David Ardia, a media law expert from Harvard University, explains in the video linked above, the Communications Decency Act and case law provides some help. In numerous cases, Ardia says, courts have decided that a website publisher has no obligation to remove user-posted content, event after the publisher has been notified that it may be defamatory.

“Courts don’t want to put you in the position of having to determine whether something is defamatory or not,” Ardia says. “You’d be in a position as a website operator to have to engage in factual investigation after publication to determine whether or not to remove material.”

That is to say, we cannot be expected to fact-check the content users post to our website. It is not the Chronicle’s job to determine whether a user is lying or whether he or she is simply wrong or misinformed.

The Suggestion

My suggestion to the employee was to respond to the comments using our comment system to “set the record straight.” This is, perhaps, the best business practice possible in this situation because it makes it clear that the business cares about its image and that it’s willing to talk with customers who are unhappy — rather than try to delete online postings that don’t paint a rosy picture.

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Of course the Web’s not dead. It may not even be dying – it all depends on how you crunch the numbers and what unit you choose to measure with. The headline is meant to draw readers in, and it has done its job well.

So what does the article, written by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, actually say? It’s really a pair of articles that focus on the rise of the app-centric Internet. Anderson says that twas users killed the Web, for they chose “getting” over “browsing.”

An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned into business as usual. We get the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.

How do you “get” things online? You choose applications that just work, like the programs you download from the iTunes Store for your iPad or the doodads you run on your smartphone or the Netflix functionality built in to your X-box. Every time a user buys or uses an app instead of a Web browser, it’s a vote for a more closed and centrally organized system, Anderson says.

Rather that seeing this as the death of creativity, as Jonathan Zittrain more or less does, Anderson sees this as a natural stage in the evolution of markets, industries and media. We would do well, he says, to remember that the Web does not represent the pinnacle of Internet-use evolution.

The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving. As it moved from your desktop to your pocket, the nature of the Net changed. The delirious chaos of the open Web was an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now they’re doing what industrialists do best — finding choke points. And by the looks of it, we’re loving it.

Wolff’s article takes a different approach, saying that it was businesses looking for ways to turn an online profit that led the way toward the app-focused Internet. Companies that grow huge online eventually reach a critical mass, he writes. After that, they become too big to beat. They become an empire. The sun never sets on them. Google did it. Amazon did too, for a while.

But no empire lasts forever. So rather than beating them at their game, which they’ve already mastered, the challengers find ways to innovate and to play a new game on a different ballfield. The new game is so innovative and so different that people flock to it — think of Facebook here. Soon, the new game becomes simply a way of life and an empire of its own, all without directly competing with the old empires.

The biggest moneymaking game in town now is providing quality content to consumers. The content producers will make money by charging people for access to that content on an app platform — and people will pay for it because it’s easy, it works and it looks good. The content producers will also make money off of advertisers, who will be more willing to pay more money for ads that reach a stable audience, rather than the brigades of drifters that comprise normal Web traffic.

Since the dawn of the commercial Web, technology has eclipsed content. The new business model is to try to let the content — the product, as it were — eclipse the technology.

No matter how you look at it, app use is on the rise. And while it’s not necessarily killing the Web, we would do well to remember that there’s an open and generative Internet waiting behind all those pretty and well-designed apps, an Internet just waiting for another BIG THING to bring the next generation of media moguls to their knees and painfully shatter their precious networks.

This all reminds me of something Clay Shirky wrote last year. He focused on the death of newspapers, but the idea fits:

Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

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The particular example Ingram notes comes from veteran television host Peter Funt, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Funt contends that people complaining that no one will pay for news online overlook

“the fact that virtually all trend lines in recent communications history have moved, with success, from free distribution to some form of pay model.”

People, he says, are willing to pay as long as they see value in what they are paying for.

He ends on this note (before demonizing summarizers and aggregators):

“But if free TV could become pay TV, and if free radio could become pay radio, then it would seem to be easier for pay printed newspapers to become pay online newspapers.”

Ingram rightly notes that Funt is overlooking some facts too, namely that news is not the same sort of creature as television and radio. HBO and satellite radio providers succeed because they offer content unlike anything available for free.

“The reality,” Ingram writes, “is that most of what newspapers offer is a commodity product, something that has a relatively short shelf life and therefore is difficult to sell as unique or different.”

In other words, facts are facts. You can’t copyright them, even if the FTC wants to call them “proprietary facts” in its reinvention of journalism draft paper. And facts are only news for a few minutes, or milliseconds. After that, the scoop is gone and your fact is common knowledge.

So if you’re not going to make any money on facts and if ads aren’t even worth as much as the electrons they’re printed on, what can a news organization do online to make money?

Data.

One of the biggest strengths of journalism throughout its modern history has been its ability to shed light on dark corners of government. Right now, most of those dark corners are filled with mountains of unsorted data that can, by its sheer volume, hide corruption and secrets.

Because of the Web and government transparency laws, almost anyone can go out and download an entire database of government documents or tax records or GIS data, but who can make sense of it? How many people can design a method to display that data in a way that users can interact with?

If news organizations and journalists want to do something truly valuable to democracy, they will focus not on finding ways to charge for digital versions the same paragraphs they print on dead trees daily but rather on giving readers a way to understand this flood of incomprehensible data.

Journalists these days are always shouting for ways to make their expertise useful. Newspapers are searching vainly for ways to create unique products that people want to pay for.

There you go.

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This is a down-side to paywalls that’s probably worth talking about. Whistleblowers want exposure. Paywall systems don’t provide that. Rather than getting the news out to everybody, the whistleblower who goes to a newspaper with a paywalled site gets the news out only to subscribers.

When your goal is to blow the lid off some scandal, you go the the paper with the biggest potential audience. Paywalled sites don’t provide that.

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I can understand their surface reasoning. Why give it away when we offer a paid online alternative? (I do not think the paid online alternative is a quality product for our readers, but that is just my opinion.)

In contrast, I feel like this decision will unnecessarily handicap one of our products for the sake of another. Moreover, a robust website is a better future than the Flash-based paid system. I also don’t feel like the honchos are making this decision based on hard audience data.

What numbers, counterarguments and blog posts out there can I read and bring to corporate’s attention to make them understand the situation as I see it? I’m open to all ideas.

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Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star, surveyed 110 news organizations to find out how they deal with such requests. A majority of news organizations, 78.2 percent, said they would remove content given a good enough reason.

Almost all the papers, though, said unpublishing was a last resort. Publishing corrections, addendums, follow-up stories or even redacting some content were go-to alternatives to unpublishing.

Unpublish requests are a natural evolution of online news, where they are actually possible. If we were still publishing all our news on dead trees, this would not be an issue.

I’m a hard-liner when it comes to these requests. Just because news websites have the ability to unpublish material, it doesn’t mean that we should.

I hold most firmly to this position in the case when a source, after the story has run, asks that his or her name be removed from the article or for the whole article to be deleted. I’m sorry, but adults who talk to reporters have chosen to do so. They should be held responsible for what they say when they know they are talking to the press.

I’m more lenient when it comes to situations where leaving information online could cause someone harm. In most of those cases, provided that the potential harm could be proven, I’d support redacting content. Removing, though... I can’t quite bring myself to that.

My rules relax most when it comes to comments. I had a call this week from a local lawyer who wanted a comment about him removed from our website because it called him slimy. He came in with a bad attitude, and I passed the buck up to the managing editor to make the call — knowing full well that the ME would OK the deletion.

The thing was this: If the caller had come in with a better attitude, I probably would have removed the comment right away, even while he was on the phone. Since he came in mad at the newspaper and whoever was on the other end of the phone, his satisfaction was delayed.

The ME has put it this way in the past, and I’m inclined to agree: It’s not as if most comments on the board contribute a heck of a lot to civilized discourse. Deleting one of them should not be a hair-pulling decision.

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Allnutt said the paper has, for years, struggled to find enough advertising to pay the bills. Dropping to a six-day schedule will save the paper quite a bit of money.

The Saturday paper will, for all intents and purposes, become the Sunday paper, the “Weekend Gazette.”

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This is, perhaps, the best illustration I have seen so far of what Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is about — at least the best illustration in comic strip form.

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I also bought The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which I will read immediately after Shirky’s book. I imagine that I will be somewhat more angry after reading Carr, but that’s generally how I feel after reading something he’s written about the Internet. I expect it from him.

You can credit Nieman Journalism Lab with getting me to buy Carr’s book. On the lab blog, Matthew Battles is writing ongoing reviews of both books as he reads them (in five parts, as of this writing — 1 2 3 4 5) Battles has inspired me to do my own “reviews” — or at least thoughtful write-ups. I hope this will get me back into an academic frame of mind; since leaving grad school, that sort of deep analytic reading and writing has fallen by the wayside.

I should also mention that I bought both of these books not on paper but in iBooks. This will be my first serious experience in reading a book entirely in an electronic format. I’ll share some thoughts on that as I go along too. So far, so good.

(The above image is borrowed respectfully from the Nieman Journalism Lab.)

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I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, I thought I’d explain the long absence. Long ago in this blogging game, I learned that unexpected and unintended hiatuses happen. It’s the nature of blogging, especially when you’re not paid to write for the blog. Actually, I take that back. If I was a guest poster on someone else’s blog, I’d feel more obligated to make regular postings, but since this is my own blog, I let it slide from time to time.

As I said, the inevitability of hiatuses is something I learned about long ago. I also learned that’s it’s almost pointless to apologize for them. It’s my blog, after all.

Still, I thought this hiatus might be worth explaining. You see, I started a blog for my job. I’m a regular blogger for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle now. You can find what I’m doing over at Becker’s Online Journal.

I try to stick to the topic of digitalia and all things tech related on that new blog, but I built into the description a little leeway to allow myself to post the odd and quirky things that befit my online nature.

So please, take some time to read over at that site too.

On with the iPad already

In a word, the iPad is awesome, but you already knew that from countless other reviews out there. It’s almost universally loved, and the story is no different at my house, where we have not one, but two of the devices. (There was simply no way I could buy just one. One spouse would have become murderously jealous of the other.)

Why do I love the iPad? It has a screen-tilt-rotation lock switch. No kidding. My biggest and loudest pet peeve about the iPod Touch was the inability to read most Web pages and use most apps while laying on my side in bed. Now, I can recline any way I want and lock the iPad’s screen in the desired orientation.

OK, there are some work-related benefits too. The ability to use Dropbox, Evernote and all those other Web services on the device is extraordinarily useful and saves me from having to lug my MacBook Pro around to do most everyday computing tasks. One downside to the device is that it’s a bit heavy and awkward to hold, so I’m always afraid I’m going to drop it when I’m holding it up in a chair or in bed.

The apps, oh, my, god, the apps. I have spent more money on apps since buying the thing than I probably did in all the years I owned my iPod Touches combined. Still, it’s a small price to pay for the convenience of mobile computing.

Of special note, GoodReader. I’ll let you read about the app yourself to see why.

Upsides:

• Tremendous battery life
• Big ol’ screen
• Good enough suite of apps to get most work done
• Gets people talking to you in restaurants
• Has a built in microphone! (Hello Google voice search! Hello recording interviews without lugging a separate voice recorder.)

Downsides:

• It’s hard for me to type on. I wouldn’t want to write more than an e-mail or a few notes.
• A bit awkward to hold when reading while lying down.
• It’s hard to see cursor placement when you’re moving the thing around. My finger is always in the way.
• No Flash.
• No camera.

If you’ve got an iPad at home and disagree with me, do so in the comments. If you’ve got questions, put ‘em in the comments. I may even respond to you using the WordPress app on iPad. You never know with me.

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