Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post says: "People no longer want to just passively sit back and be served up information. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news. News has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse."
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/07/19/commenting.on.news.sites/index.html?hpt=C2
This article deals with issues that journalists and news sites are having with nasty user comments. Online news publishers struggle between granting anonymity, which allows users to post whatever they please (even defamatory or derogatorry comments) without revealing their identity, and moderating comments by requiring contributors to register and/or pay a small fee.
The Wall Street Journal has a commenter who has made inflamatory comments that have gotten her death threats but she states, "The opportunity to post your ideas and beliefs far outweigh a few crazy people."
Bill Adee from the Chicago Tribune suggests tying commenter's posts to their online social media profiles. While this would certainly reign in a lot of the trash talk, is it going to encourage the type of comments that drive people to the news site? I'm not sure what to think...
Interesting thoughts - I also have noted a tendency toward inflammatory comments on many of the new sites. One of the sites I use in my classroom is Topix.com. It customizes the news based on your IP address and gives you local though international trending topics. Every Monday I required my classes to blog about their own personal news from the weekend. To combat the "I didn't do anything" syndrome, I gave the alternative assignment to comment on a news item that was trending. I noticed the vast range in quality of responses and decided to incorporate in my instruction. We analyzed the comments as a class, noting which were more likely to influence the readers' opinions. Naturally the inflammatory comments, although sometimes humorous, were not taken very seriously. This evolved into a lesson on how to write a response the would influence a change in the reader's thoughts. Persuasive writing just happens to be a focus in 8th grade, so this fits nicely into the curriculum.
ReplyDeleteK.R.-- I really like that you turned this into a lesson on persuasive writing! Our local newspaper's community forum is all over the place in terms of the quality of public posts, from insightful and well reasoned to flaming hate speech. I came across a "forum for forum moderators", and some of them allow annonymous posts but then sometimes block/ban IP addresses of abusive posters.
ReplyDelete