Let people’s names, faces and bigotry be seen for the whole world to judge. If the comments are going to be held in anonymity, it gives some people who would otherwise keep quiet in fear of being viewed as a racist, an open forum from which to spread their ideas to large numbers of people. Some of these people may think it’s okay to do this and be influenced by it. That’s the catch though. Only when they know they have no responsibility for their words do they begin to take their hate to a new level. Ask those same people to go on the news or get on YouTube and say the same thing and how many takers would you have? but isn’t that when a movment builds steam? when people stand up and say I am Blank and I believe BLANK?

As an example, if a man is shot, and his family reads the comments under the news story about the murder and sees people with names like BroadSt212 or W-BankRoc saying things like, “another thug gone” or “he probably killed someone last week, that’s how it works on the street” then it isn’t really much of a conversation worthy of reflection. I am sure if these posters were in a situation where they were in a room full of strangers, or even friends, perhaps they would tone down their rhetoric because they know it may be viewed with disdain and they will be judged by it. However, give them a forum in which they can be as irresponsible as they choose (after just having read some horrible news article) and then they kick it up a notch. so the forum itself is no so much a reflection of society’s ills but another cause of them.

Every now and again, out on the street, I see a woman who has a nice shape, would it be an accurate reflection of the community if I went up to her and told her? Perhaps. But why does it feel so wrong? And why has that same society deemed that it isn’t the norm? Because we have spent a few thousand years setting up a system of morals and values that should still be adhered to even in the light of a communications revolution.

Leaving aside the realities and specifics of nola.com and New Orleans for a moment, let’s give it one level of abstraction and hypothetical remove:

You have a major local website serving a community… and the online forums are filled with race anger… and the community it’s serving is filled with race anger… how much should those expressions of anger be curtailed, if they honestly reflect the community’s concerns?

I am definitely not pro-bigotry, but if the community itself is riven by barely suppressed racial rage, where is the line between propagating or encouraging it vs. letting angry individuals in the community voice their anger & thus accurately reflecting the community the site serves?

Just a pot-stirring question that occurred to me…

Most newspapers’ overall online presence has zero to do with the newspapers themselves… with a couple obvious flagship exceptions, the few independent papers just do whatever their budgets allow and the vast, big-media-owned majority do whatever their overlords instruct them to.

Sorry to crassly introduce filthy lucre into the discussion, but until someone establishes an easy, efficient system for making newspapers profitable online, I think the excellence of any given newspaper’s online version– including its blogs and user communities– will be more a source of bragging rights (”look how cutting edge we are”) than a serious component of the newspaper’s larger mission…

A friend used to work at the site. I guess the people running it had read somewhere that websites should be dynamic. So, to make NOLA.com dynamic they insisted on rewriting the headlines every few hours.

I don’t know what to say about their claim that over the line comments get removed in 5-7 minutes. Either that’s just not true or NOLA.com’s tolerance for racist ranting is pretty high. So much of the site reads like a Klan discussion board.

And I’m not a fan of the “blogs” either. From what I can tell, they’re just posting early versions of stories. Often the print edition is longer and better edited, from what I can tell. The problem is that these versions get highlighted while the final, print version is almost impossible to find.

Newspapers are terrified of the internet. They all seem to think it will kill them. At the same time, they haven’t (with a few exceptions) thought much about how to present themselves on the internet.

And now here they are participating in a discussion panel as if they are a part of the blogsphere like all of us… crack-pipe crazy, man.

Peace,

Tim