One week ago, Buffalo News Editor Margaret Sullivan announced that The News would be "seeking a return to civility in online comments" by forcing commenters to provide their real names. Anyone who has been paying a modicum of attention to The News' website knows that the comments there were never civil and, therefore, this "return to civility" strangely references something that never existed. Of course, reasonable people can disagree as to whether websites should allow anonymous commenting. We had the debate on Buffalo Rising a few months ago. Some people think it's critical to fostering candid, free-flowing discourse. Others think it enables worthless trash talk unworthy of publication.
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Leaving aside that increasingly tired debate, the News' decision is remarkable on a number of levels. First, BuffaloNews.com only started to allow online comments about a year ago. So our hometown paper's delay in allowing comments is rivaled only by their haste in giving up on them.
Second, The News is resorting to this drastic move because of the quality of comments on their site. For whatever reason, commenters on BuffaloNews.com were the worst of the worst. On any given day, you would find volumes of racist, bigoted, hateful text that you'd rarely find on other smaller WNY media sites. Why is that? Well, it's hard to say but one reason why this kind of terrible nonsense thrived on BuffaloNews.com is because The News put little to no effort into moderating comments. Communities require cultivation. Either The News was unaware of this or didn't want to bother to put the resources into cultivation. Without cultivation, the weeds take over. And they did take over in the comment section of BuffaloNews.com.
Third, The News is going to attempt to ban anonymous commenting by setting up a system equivalent to tracking letters to the editor - requiring commenters to provide phone numbers and hometowns so staffers at The News can confirm identities is nothing short of absurd. The News could have required commenters to log in using 'verified' accounts like Facebook Connect. They could have then displayed the comments provided by 'verified' commenters at the top of the comment stream and shoved anonymous comments to the bottom. Or, they could have put the anonymous comments behind yet another click-through screen. They could have tried all sorts of 21st century solutions, but instead, The News is going to use the only process they're comfortable with - pen and paper letter to the editor-style verification. It's as if a bunch of people with AOL email addresses are deciding how The News will deal with all technological issues.
What's next - pulling down the current Buffalo News website and simply publishing the daily print version of the paper as a downloadable pdf? Other local publishers thought that approach would be all the rage.
While it's disappointing that The News is running away from this issue, it's not at all surprising. The paper has been slow to adapt to the changing media landscape as management continues to hope the world goes back to 1975. They want the internet to go away, but it won't. Other online media has been quick - and right - to roundly criticize this decision by The News.
But we want to know what you think. So have at it in the comments.
I already canceled my subscription to the Buffalo News, so I can't really do anything to tell them how disappointed I am in their new approach.
I don't believe that most comments on the Buffalo News site were that far out of line. Sure there are many racist and bigoted comments, but they were relatively easy to skip over. If you want some real fun, check out the Charlotte or Atlanta newspapers about 10 minutes after they post a story about an African American who is arrested. Those comments are seriously racist. The veiled racist comments or over-reaction from certain commentators in Buffalo pale in comparison.
Then again, who really cares. Many people go back to the Buffalo News site several times a day to see the comments. If the Buffalo News is naive enough to think that the traffic to the site is because of the stories they write, then I can understand why they feel that this approach to comments is appropriate. Good luck to them.
I predict you're right about the BN web traffic, and sooner or later they'll realize it too and back off their ban on anonymous comments.
I also agree that for most BN articles, most comments aren't terrible. Most there are of similar quality to most on BR, but BR has done a much better job of consistently moderating the overly hostile and abusive. BR does reasonably tolerate some abusiveness and hostility (both are part of life), and sometimes they're biased about what they delete - but overall BR usually strikes a very good balance in comment moderating. It's strange the BN apparently never made that a priority and yet they want to ban anon comments. It sounds like managerial incompetence which won't change until they have leadership turnover.