Author: Mathew Ingram

Updated:

Kurt Greenbaum has apologized for overreacting in his original response to this incident, although he doesn’t explicitly say that he is sorry for calling the school and indirectly causing someone to lose their job.

As someone whose job involves thinking about our social-media policies and our approach to comment behaviour, I’m always looking at what other newspapers and media outlets are doing, and today I came across a case that crossed a line — for me, at least — in terms of how to deal with problem commenters. It involved a vulgar comment made by a user at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website, and the response by the site’s director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum.

According to Greenbaum’s blog post (which was mirrored on his personal blog), someone posted a comment on a story in which they used a colloquial or slang term for female genitalia. It was deleted, but then was reposted. Greenbaum says he noticed that the comment alert from WordPress showed that it came from a nearby school. So Greenbaum called the school, and they asked him to send them the email with the comment, which he apparently did. About six hours later, he says, the school called and said that an employee had been confronted and that he had resigned.

Am I the only one who thinks that doing this goes way beyond the normal course of editorial behaviour? Continue reading “Comment behaviour: How far is too far?”

There’s been plenty of recent discussion about Rupert Murdoch and his “I’m taking my sites out of Google” campaign (which I mentioned in this post), and much of the debate centers around whether he is serious or just blustering. Jack Schafer at Slate seems to lean towards the latter, saying:

Murdoch is simply jawboning. Three months ago he promised that News Corp. would start charging for its newspapers by June 2010. Now he doubts that the company will hit that mark. In typical Murdochian fashion, he’s sowing confusion and harvesting bewilderment.

and

If it were in News Corp.’s economic interests to dig an Internet moat around its newspaper properties, Murdoch would have already done it rather than talk about it. Instead, he’s shouting about it to signal to his competitors 1) where he’d like to take News Corp. and 2) his desperate desire for them to follow.

Mark Cuban is convinced that it’s worth it for Murdoch to at least try to do without Google, since there’s the chance that it might actually pay off, and if it doesn’t then he can just re-enter the index and things will go back to normal (I’m not sure that’s the case, but then I’m not a media mogul like Mark). But Mike Arrington at TechCrunch does the best job of laying out what might be at the core of Rupert’s strategy (assuming he isn’t just blustering).

In a nutshell, the idea is that Rupert cuts a deal with either Microsoft or Yahoo to index his sites (similar to the deal he cut with Google to index MySpace), and hopes that this encourages other major media outlets to do the same. If he can get enough to jump on board — and it sounds like Associated Press is halfway there already — the thinking is he could put pressure on Google to pay up as well. Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe has some more ammunition for this view, with reports of secret negotiations between Microsoft and some of the major publishers.

Erick Schonfeld has compared this “Come on, boys — let’s give Google what for!” strategy to the final scene in the movie Gallipoli, and to a military strategy from Blackadder (I’ve chosen General George Armstrong Custer). But whether it’s Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn or Gallipoli or Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the underlying point is that Murdoch’s approach seems futile. Will other media outlets join his crusade? Perhaps — but I doubt enough of them to make a difference.

Will people switch search engines in order to get specific content from specific media outlets? I highly doubt it. Of course, all Rupert has to do is convince Microsoft or Yahoo that they will do so, and then get them to pay him. Even in failing, the old bugger could still wind up winning.

Update:

Jeff Jarvis explains why there is approximately zero chance of anyone important joining Murdoch’s anti-Google crusade.

It may have gotten lost amid the back-and-forth in the comments on her piece at the Columbia Journalism Review — many of which take her to task for criticizing “crowdfunding” startup Spot.us and its role in the Garbage Patch story the New York Times published recently — but I thought Megan Garber made an excellent point in her critique of the piece: namely, that freelance reporter Lindsey Hoshaw’s personal blog was a far better presentation of the trip and the fascinating story behind it than the New York Times story was.

Whose fault is that? Probably the Times, for forcing the story into the standard format rather than trying something different, but assigning blame is hardly the point. And in any case, the NYT should be given all kinds of credit for experimenting with the Spot.us partnership, and for being so flexible that Spot.us founder and all-around smart guy David “Digidave” Cohn — whom I respect and I admire — said the Grey Old Lady “interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup.” High praise indeed.

But to get back to my main point, if you look at the NYT story you see (or at least I saw) exactly what Megan describes in her post at CJR: a story that repeats a lot of known information about the Great Garbage Patch, with very little of the human side of Lindsay’s story. I found her personal blog far more interesting, and I bet I’m not the only one. She talks about — and shows photos of — the Mahi Mahi the crew ate so much of, the cramped quarters that the crew inhabited, the gourmet meals whipped up by the ship’s cook, and the garbage the ship came across along the way.

Obviously, not every news story deserves the blog treatment, but I think this one certainly did. I got far more out of it, was far more engaged with it, cared more about it and identified more with the reporter at the centre of it. A great job by Lindsay, and despite the criticisms of the outcome, a great effort by Spot.us as well. Dave Cohn describes the genesis of the project and the process it went through, as well as some of the lessons learned.

Rupert Murdoch, that sly old rascal, caused a minor Twitter-storm recently, with an interview in which he suggested that News Corp. might remove its websites from Google, which he has described in the past as a “thief” that takes content without asking (Google, for its part, said that it would be more than happy to oblige Rupert’s whims in this regard). As Mike Masnick at Techdirt also noted, Murdoch even went so far as to argue that “fair use” principles were likely illegal, and would eventually be proven so. You have to give the guy credit for knowing a soundbite when he sees one.

Mark Cuban, another crusty old billionaire (although just a pup compared to Rupe), used these remarks as a jumping-off point for his own flight of rhetorical fancy, in which he argued that social-recommendation networks such as Twitter and Facebook were far more important than Google, and that therefore Rupert was right and all the “information-must-be-free bigots” who criticized him must be wrong. But as Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) pointed out on Twitter after I posted a link to Cuban’s rant, all the social-recommendations in the world aren’t going to help Rupert if he insists on putting his content behind pay walls.

David Santori made a similar point in a comment on one of my paywall-related posts at the Nieman Journalism Lab. As he put it:

“overlooked in all this is the social aspect: any web item that interests or amuses or intrigues me, I want to share. And if I can’t share it promptly and easily — in an email link or on my blog or Facebook “wall” or in a tweet — I will be frustrated and irked just in proportion to the degree of interest I felt in the item.”

and

“The NYT registration barrier was in fact a micropayment system, one in which the payment was extracted in the form of the reader’s time and keystrokes to log in whenever they got a link to a useful story.”

I think both David and Steve make an excellent point, one which publishers ignore at their peril. Readers online may not pay you directly with currency, but they pay you with their time and attention (the foundation of the so-called “attention economy”) and it’s in your interest to make things as easy for them as possible — which is just one strike amongst many against pay walls. And if Mark Cuban is right (which I think he is) about social recommendations becoming increasingly important as a way to find valuable content, what happens when someone shares a link to your pay-walled content?

What happens is a potential reader runs headfirst into that wall, or has to jump through all sorts of hoops to read it (i.e., check to see if there is a Google News loophole), and that is a significant disincentive to a) read anything further, or b) share any links themselves. It’s the classic cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face problem: you try to generate incremental revenue through restricted access, but by doing so you deprive your content of even more valuable re-distribution through recommendation networks, which in the long run reduces your traffic and thus your revenue.

Paul Carr, who started writing for TechCrunch not long ago, is an entertaining writer, and he often puts his finger on issues that others tend to avoid in their headlong rush towards whatever is shiny and new, which is why I’m glad Mike Arrington hired him. But I think his latest rant against “citizen journalism” is misplaced. In the piece, which is entitled “After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth,” Carr talks about how a soldier on the base where the shootings occurred last week was posting to Twitter throughout the ordeal.

Tearah Moore, who recently returned from Iraq, posted a number of comments about what was happening, including the fact that stretchers were being brought in, that one person had allegedly been shot in the testicles, and that the shooter had died. Among other things, Carr notes that Moore’s tweet about the shooter being dead was wrong (although she didn’t say that she knew this, she just commented on it). But his main complaint seems to be that her tweets about someone being shot in the testicles, etc. had no redeeming value and were therefore “entertainment or tragi-porn.”

As he puts it, her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out but was a case of “look at me looking at this.” He then goes on to say that the tweeting of events during protests in Iran did nothing to actually change events in that country, and that all of this so-called “citizen journalism” is merely selfish and egotistical. And finally, he argues that this applies to the shocking video footage of Neda Agha Soltan’s death in Iran — that the person shooting the video didn’t try to help, but simply engaged in a cruel and unfeeling act of voyeurism.

The question of whether bystanders or observers should intervene in emergency situation is a worthwhile debate to have, but I don’t think Carr’s examples meet the test.

Continue reading “Citizen journalism: I’ll take it, flaws and all”

As anyone who has commented on a Globe and Mail story probably knows, we have a policy on what kinds of comments are appropriate and which ones are removed, but I confess that we haven’t always done a great job of communicating that policy clearly and consistently to our readers — in part because our policy has been evolving, and continues to do so (which I would argue is a good thing).

So why and how are comments on Globe stories taken down? Why doesn’t the Globe require commenters to use their real names? Why do some comments simply disappear, while others are replaced by a message that says they weren’t “consistent with our guidelines?” Do Globe reporters ever respond to comments, and under what conditions?

These are the kinds of questions that our Community Guidelines FAQ was developed to answer. It also deals with how we approach other forms of community engagement, including live discussions (which we do using software from Toronto’s Cover It Live) and forums, which we are in the process of rolling out on our Globe Investor site, and hopefully elsewhere.

In coming up with our policies, we have looked at the way many other media outlets handle comments and community — including sites such as The Guardian (whose policies are here), the CBC and the New York Times — as well as non-media communities like Metafilter and Slashdot. Like all of those sites, we want to allow our readers to comment on issues they feel strongly about, but at the same time we want to maintain a civil tone that encourages dialogue instead of partisan attacks.

We are probably never going to achieve that balance completely, or to everyone’s satisfaction. But we are trying hard to do so, because we know that many of you look to the Globe as a place where you can discuss important topics, and we want to encourage others to do so.

The FAQ is a work in progress, so please let me know what you think, either by posting a comment here or by reaching me at @mathewi on Twitter or via email at [email protected].

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

Want to know why so many media outlets are excited about the idea of using Facebook Connect? Staci Kramer at PaidContent provides some clues in her interview with Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau:

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

One of the things that Clay Shirky mentioned in the panel with Andrew Keen that I moderated at Ryerson University recently (my post with video here, tweet-stream here and live-blog here) was an idea that he has also written about before on his blog: namely, that one of the principal functions of a newspaper was to aggregate completely unrelated things, primarily because the newspaper company (and its advertisers) had to appeal to the widest possible group of potential readers, and couldn’t possibly know in advance which parts of the paper they were likely to be most interested in. As Clay described it in a recent talk he gave at Harvard:

“The idea that someone who is doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about the coup in Honduras or how the Lakers are doing — it doesn’t make any sense. It’s never made any sense, in terms of what the user wants. It’s what print is capable of as a bundle.”

In my desperate attempt to justify the continued existence of newspapers, I asked Clay whether that aggregation didn’t serve some kind of purpose, but he argued that it did not — that it was simply a holdover from the industrial process by which papers were created and distributed. But is it? I know that we increasingly believe that “if the news is important, it will find me” (I’m actually the number one result in Google for that phrase) and that aggregation of whatever kind we require can be performed by our friends, by service like Techmeme and Tweetmeme, by RSS feed readers, by Twitter, and so on. Heck, I use all of those things and have come to rely on them.

But are they enough? Is there a purpose in aggregating the horoscope and the weather and the news about the coup in Tegucigalpa? I think there is, and I think newspapers do a pretty good job of it.

Continue reading “In defence of newspapers and serendipity”

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

As some of you may know, I was asked by the folks at Ryerson University’s Journalism School (one of my alma maters) to host/moderate a panel on “What’s Next For News” last week, as a kickoff for the school’s “Wordstock” event, and it was my pleasure to welcome Clay Shirky — author of Here Comes Everybody and of a number of great think pieces about the future of media — and Andrew Keen, notorious Web 2.0 gadfly and cultural critic, and author of The Cult of the Amateur. We had some audio difficulties, and I rambled on a bit during my intro (as I often tend to do) but once we got into the questions we had some great back-and-forth on topics such as transparency and objectivity, the rise of Twitter, the similarities between what’s happening to media now and the Gutenberg revolution, and many others. The entire event was videotaped, and I’ve embedded part one here. You can find the other three parts at J-source.ca.