Washington Redskins star safety Sean Taylor had not yet died before news site users started posting comments about what led to his demise — and Web editors started deleting racist posts.
The first posts on WashingtonPost.com foreshadowed the thousands of comments that followed, there and elsewhere. Some people simply wished Taylor well. Others asserted that Taylor’s shady past had caught up with him. Many criticized journalists for bringing up Taylor’s legal scrapes when it was unclear whether they were relevant.
Those are the posts we can see. Others — the venomous posts, the personal attacks, the irresponsible accusations — were deleted. Even among the comments that remained, many were heated, accusatory, angry — both from people blaming Taylor and those defending him.
The debate over what led to Taylor’s death has abated, but the one over comments continues: What role does user commenting have on a news site, particularly on a fast-breaking, high-profile story such as this?
WashingtonPost.com Interactivity and Communities Editor Hal Straus said the Taylor story didn’t elicit an unusual number of problematic comments, but feedback at MiamiHerald.com turned ugly enough on the Friday after the shooting that editors suspended feedback on Taylor stories into the next day.
“There is certainly value in the comments,” said Casey Frank, day news editor for MiamiHerald.com. “It’s just sad and frustrating that so many of them are out of bounds.”
Given the subject matter — a professional athlete shot and killed in unclear circumstances — it was no surprise that Taylor stories drew so much traffic and feedback:
- At its peak during the Taylor coverage, Washingtonpost.com’s Redskins Insider blog drew 10 times as much traffic as normal, according to online sports editor Jon DeNunzio.
- MiamiHerald.com had its highest traffic day since March, when it started counting pageviews separately from the online edition of El Nuevo Herald, said Rick Hirsch, managing editor for multimedia.
- At ESPN.com, which carried wire news stories and original commentary, Executive Editor/Producer Patrick Stiegman said more than 15,000 comments were posted over 10 days.
The presumption at more and more news sites is in favor of allowing users to respond to news stories.
“After coming to online from a print background, after seeing penetration decline,” Straus said, “it’s very heartening to me that when you’re online, your audience engages with what you’re producing. But certainly we want to make the level of discussion better.”
Both WashingtonPost.com and ESPN.com editors said the level of problematic comments on the Taylor stories wasn’t high — Straus said about 200 of the more than 5,000 comments were deleted, and Stiegman said there was a slight increase over the typical rate of less than 5 percent.
The situation was different in Miami. On the Friday after Taylor’s death, MiamiHerald.com was reporting that police were in Fort Myers interviewing suspects in the shooting. Meanwhile, users started to overwhelm the site’s feedback areas with speculation about the race of the suspects.
“It was impossible to keep the commenting on the straight and narrow,” Frank said, estimating that more than one in four comments had to be deleted.
He turned off the discussion on the Taylor story and left it off until the next morning. From then on, articles focusing on the suspects generally didn’t allow user feedback, while articles about other aspects of the case did.
One reason for the different experiences may be the different commenting policies at the three Web sites. Both ESPN.com and WashingtonPost.com require users to register before commenting, and to confirm an e-mail address. MiamiHerald.com does not, though Frank said some have talked about changing that policy. (See sidebar for more discussion of feedback policies.)
The Herald has seen some benefits to its user feedback. Users spot errors, which can be corrected quickly — and before they get into print. People feel comfortable leaving tips in the feedback forums, and those tips have helped reporters in their reporting, editors said.
And online readers respond to the site’s newsgathering process, such as on the first day of the Taylor coverage when many expressed outrage that the site had reported Taylor’s home address. Hirsch said the site will do that in crime stories so people know if their own home or business is affected, but they decided to remove the address in subsequent versions of the story.
The challenge, editors said, is how to preserve those positive comments and discourage the personal attacks and racist screeds.
“The whole area of monitoring article comments is a huge challenge for us,” Hirsch said. Noting that 700 posts were made in a single afternoon to one story, he said it’s clear that “people want to talk about stories. There is bad there, but there’s a lot of good. … There are times they make me think about things I wouldn’t have thought about.”
Editors at Cincinnati.com and CincyMOMS struggled with those same issues issue earlier this year. The victim wasn’t a football player — it was a toddler who died of heatstroke, left alone in her mother’s car when she went to work as a middle school assistant principal.
The story struck at the core of the CincyMOMS community, where users normally participate in discussions about potty training and play groups.
“Some of (the discussion) was just very cruel. It was very judgmental about her,” said Karen Gutierrez, managing editor for the site. “And she also had a lot of defenders, so those two sides got in quite a battle on our message boards.”
Gutierrez said she let the discussion forums continue largely unmoderated, and longer than normal because “it seemed like people really wanted to talk about it, even though people were getting angry with each other.”
Over at Cincinnati.com, where the news stories were published, users also were posting feedback on stories, said Deputy Managing Editor Chris Graves, who oversees Cincinnati.com and its affiliated sites. Many comments were deleted — depending on the story, sometimes 10 percent, sometimes 30 percent.
At the time, Cincinnati.com allowed users to comment on stories without e-mail registration. Since then, the site has suspended article feedback and is waiting for a system that will require registration. The site does allow posting of screened comments through moderated discussions.
Even with all that invective, Graves said she supports allowing such feedback. In this case, she said, the community was asking important questions: whether the mother had been treated differently because of her status, whether mothers work too much, whether people would have reacted differently if it had been a father who left his child in a car.
“There were nasty comments in there … but underneath that tone and the accusations were the basis of really good stories, and fodder for stories and also for the larger community to think about,” Graves said.
“It’s a brave new world, and one that we don’t fully own anymore as journalists. The community is requiring us to rethink and retool ourselves,” she said. “Frankly, I think that’s a beautiful thing. I think that’s the basis of the First Amendment.”
Gutierrez said she is convinced that such discussion “makes people smarter.”
“I don’t know if it’s so much learning about the other side or coming to some agreement as it is intellectually stimulating,” she said.
There is plenty of disagreement about that. Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell said she simply wants WashingtonPost.com to monitor its comments, which she said hasn’t been a problem recently. She, too, worries about the coarseness — a comment posted on one of her columns “was from a guy alleging he had slept with me at a party,” she said.
“Don’t ask me if they help civic discourse, because I don’t see it,” she said.
On this, perhaps there is some guidance from the thousands of comments left on the Taylor stories. Wrote one user on MiamiHerald.com:
“I would first like to apologize to the FAMILY and FRIENDS for the comments I made yesterday by suggesting that the shooting could have been payback from a husband/boyfriend. Also, that Sean could’ve been messing around with someone’s wife/girlfriend. I have realized through the studying of God’s word, that life and death should only be given and taken by God. I once again apologize. Taylor Family, I’ll continue to lift you up in prayer.”
Appropriately, you have the chance to offer your thoughts here. What role does commenting have on news sites? What policies encourage worthwhile feedback, and what practices inhibit it?
