The Post-Dispatch is admittedly too lazy to foster civil discourse

Kurt Greenbaum, Social Media Director for the Post-Dispatch, has penned an interesting post titled, "6 reasons we're lazy about story comments."  A few items are of particular relevance and will be analyzed in greater depth.

The Anonymity Argument

• Kurt
  • "I concede that anonymity allows readers to hide. They probably say things online that they wouldn’t be comfortable saying face-to-face."
  • "But too often, I hear journalists saying that if we made readers use their real names, we’d solve the problem. First, it’s hogwash. We might curtail it, but we won’t solve it. The trolls will always find a way.  Second, it’s impossible. I’m skeptical of any news organization that says it requires real names. Anyone with a valid e-mail address can register under any name they’d like."
  • "Readers value anonymity"
  • "We benefit by getting more comments."
• Counterpoints
  • Marissa Mayer, Google executive, responds in this YouTube interview:  "I think the trend that concerns me most now on the Internet is the concept of anonymity. I really feel that the virtual world follows the physical world.  The physical world has been around a lot longer and it has gotten more of the kinks out -- whereas the virtual world is still very young.  I think that when we look at some of the systems, the closer the virtual world maintains parity with the physical world, the better off we are. In reality, there's very few things you can do anonymously.  I think that over time there will be less anonymity and that's a good thing. It creates more accountability -- people acting more responsibly. And you know, I really think that overall we want the web to be great.  I think that this is something we really need to work on."
  • Now that we agree anonymity is generally a detriment to society, onto the next point.  Social networks, such as Facebook (Connect) and Google (Friend Connect), are quite popular and naturally incent persons to maintain true identities.  Why?  Because reputation is important in our social lives.  To that end, the Post-Dispatch can increase accountability and civility by leveraging and linking these social network accounts w/ stltoday.com accounts.  Consider surveying your active participants to determine the percentage that maintains social networking accounts.  It's fair to suggest that approximately 80% of this number would link their accounts if the process were simple.
  • Next, Kurt asserts that fostering accountability may curtail abuse but never completely solve it.  True, but what's significant is that it can only serve to improve civil discourse.  As we've discovered, this is good.  The phenomenon that, "trolls will always find a way" is acceptable and serves as a blessing in disguise if one believes that anonymity can be constructive.  The point is that if a simple mechanism is created as discussed above to promote accountability, most people will utilize it.  Again, this is a good thing.
  • The last comment in this argument states that the Post-Dispatch benefits from getting more comments.  If an environment fostering civil discussions were implemented, wouldn't the number of comments likely increase? Not only that, but the utilization of OpenID accounts (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) makes it easier for readers to authenticate to stltoday.com and therefore would likely increase levels of interaction, resulting in increased revenue.

The "We Expect Technology to Solve our Problems" Argument

• Kurt: "The first complaint I often hear about story comments is over the inability to filter out the bad stuff, to prevent readers from saying certain things, or to adequately ban the bad actors. I agree that good tools — the commenting system at Digg.com comes to mind — can make the job easier for journalists and give readers more control over what they see. Good tools can let readers hide or ignore trolls. They can automatically ban trolls who get too many negative rankings. And they can help moderators stay on top of the discussion.  But ultimately, the human eye is the only thing that can really control the conversation. Technology won’t fix this problem. Expecting journalists to read and deal with the comments will."
• Counterpoint: The above paragraph is likely indicative of just how great the chasm is between perception and reality. "Technology won't fix this problem but journalists will?"  Journalists haven't effectively dealt with this issue in the past and are unable to do it by themselves in the future.  This is no defect of the journalist -- it's just a simple fact of constrained resources in the newsroom.  However, a unique quality of technology is its ability to scale.  This strength must be leveraged smartly and can serve as an efficient filter.  
  • First, establish the previously discussed identity mechanism to naturally improve civility. By extension, consider augmenting the reader's profile with activity feeds ala Facebook where past interaction can be displayed to further increase accountability.
  • As mentioned, an additional and effective filter that scales well is the community moderation capability that Digg.com is known for. Community moderation will punish the trolls while rewarding anonymous inputs that are constructive. Although not a perfect solution, it's pretty effective on balance.
  • Last but not least, the journalist. Effective use of technology has allowed him or her to spend more time on value-added activities while both comment civility and revenue have increased.
  • In summary, Kurt's point is invalid because the Post-Dispatch isn't utilizing any of this technology.

The "We Exaggerate the Problem" Argument

• Kurt: "As mentioned earlier, the Star Tribune won’t allow comments on eight categories of stories: crime, Muslims, fatalities/suicides, gays, distressed local companies, racially sensitive stories, local homes stories and those by a local columnist. No question, most of those categories bring out the trolls. Those are the comments our critics — including those in our own newsrooms — tend to fixate on. But let’s face it, that’s a sliver of the news, sports, business and feature content we produce each day. We get lots of comments on lots of stories. Most of them are fine."
• Counterpoint: The St. Louis metropolitan area is a classic study in polarization and could benefit from increased levels of understanding in such issues as race, sexual orientation, class, geography (city vs. county), religion, etc.  The Post-Dispatch acknowledges this in maintaining a blog titled, "Conversations on Race" yet surprisingly fosters a commenting environment that encourages the spread of ignorance which serves to divide us. Our aim is to compile a running list of stltoday.com comments to highlight that this problem is no mere exaggeration and needs to be addressed. Additionally, that the Post-Dispatch admits it is too lazy to effectively handle this problem is not only disheartening, but irresponsible.