Tag Archives: commenting

Journalism can’t be a one-way street anymore

By Michael Becker | Published: February 7, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Authority Issues, New Media, Social Networking | Also tagged , | Leave a comment

Responding to readers by proxy

By Michael Becker | Published: January 20, 2010
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 have [...]
Posted in New Media, Social Networking | Also tagged , | Comments closed

A cooling off period in Bloomington, Ill.

By Michael Becker | Published: January 7, 2010
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, [...]
Posted in New Media, Print Culture, Social Networking | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

Comment moderation: How far is too far?

By Michael Becker | Published: November 18, 2009
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 for [...]
Posted in Authority Issues, New Media, Social Networking | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

Dan Gilmore’s ideas for running a news organization

By Michael Becker | Published: September 15, 2009
Dan Gilmore has an insight­ful list of things he’d do if he ran a news orga­ni­za­tion. The high­lights, for me: Involve the read­ers audi­ence as much as pos­si­ble in things like com­mu­nity blogs, wikis and com­ments but give the most involved some sort of rewards. In Gilmore’s words “We’d make it clear we’re not look­ing for free labor.” Articles [...]
Posted in New Media | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

  • Recent Comments