BRATTLEBORO — We don't receive a huge number of comments on our website - 10 to 15 on a good week, maybe. By some news website standards, that volume would likely be perceived as a failure.
I say it's working.
The comments that we get are overwhelmingly constructive and well thought out. They've jump-started our letters section considerably.
I attribute most of those good qualities to our pretty-darned-strict terms of service.
We ask for your real name and where you live - which is no different from what we ask from people who write letters to this section - and I consider every comment for publication in the print paper, which gives it a new and different audience.
We've been chugging along for some months now with these rules, so it came as somewhat of a shock when a reader going by the screen name “NoWayInVermont” submitted a response to a provocative, heartfelt piece that we published from Leslie Flanagan, who was saying goodbye - and, with some bitter candor, good riddance - to Bellows Falls.
The comment was not about the piece, but about our commenting policy.
“The demand for non-anonymity is quite an effective weapon against honest feedback regarding this piece,” the writer said. “If you have to still live here, how can you leave a sympathetic comment without serious repercussions? The Commons is clearly a journalistic endeavor and can afford anonymity; here it actively works against their interest.
“And yes, I created the username as well as the email account just for these two cents.”
The same writer followed up a day later:
“Cowards at the helm of The Commons:
“I can subscribe anonymously but not comment on a substantive issue without endangering life and limb.
“Cowards.”
I genuinely feel this reader's anxiety. But if this person is the one who is afraid to leave a comment, however legitimately, how does that make us the cowards?
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The fact of the matter is, online discussions can go wild without some reasonable ground rules.
As a consumer of news, I've seen this tightening-up repeated, again and again, on site after site in response to wincingly horrible comments that nobody, but nobody, would dare say in public.
I celebrate and embrace free speech. Most of us who work in newspapers do. Our life's work is dedicated to getting information out into the open, not acting as a party to suppressing it.
But what happens when that very freedom creates a news website environment that gets so far out of control that it turns readers away?
Paul Stern, a former editor at the Hartford Courant, found himself in the thick of this debate in 2008 when he made an impassioned case against the message boards of Topix, a media partner on his paper's website.
Closer to home, the Reformer's Topix boards made the news in 2010 when Bob Thomson, Rockingham Selectboard vice-chair, quit in response to abusive posts on the service, citing the psychological toll such public discourse was having on his family and employees.
The Reformer, like the Courant, has since engineered a new commenting system on its website, with much stricter terms of service.
But what happened with these boards, used by a readership that did not have to identify itself to anyone, not even the newspapers themselves, is eye-opening.
“These hateful comments are put up - under our banner - by anonymous people who bear no responsibility for their content,” Stern wrote in a memo that year, in which he begged his bosses to change the commenting procedure to no avail. “They are posted instantly, without screening or pre-qualification or permission of any kind; and they remain there indefinitely until someone else cites them as offensive and I take them down.”
“At least once a week - and recently, more often - I find myself explaining to an aggrieved reader why our boards have included false, hurtful, one-sided and misleading posts about them or their loved ones - comments a newspaper would never allow in print for both legal and ethical reasons,” Stern said, noting that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects newspapers from liability for comments on websites that could be lawsuit fodder in print.
“[A]llowing this kind of material onto our web site is a violation of everything a respectable newspaper company should stand for in its community: fairness, balance, accuracy, decency and concern for the rights of the individual,” Stern wrote. “It is a violation of the ethical standards every journalist should hold dear.”
Amen.
Most newspapers today take a middle ground, insisting on real names and accountability for print-edition letters but only on user registration with a valid email for online comments.
That minimal measure curbs the worst aspects of unrestrained, unfiltered, uncivilized, hurtful, destructive commentary online.
That's not good enough. Fundamentally, people should know who is writing, especially when the comments are about people who are our neighbors. That's why newspapers publish letters that are signed.
This minimal identification still give writers ample opportunity to express themselves in ways that can be uncivilized, hurtful, and maybe even destructive, but at the very least identification forces sunlight to shine on the source.
Bottom line: If a comment online is not up to the same minimal standards of commentary that I want to publish in the paper, I want no part of it.
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But - and this is a big but - on rare occasion and for good reason, I've also withheld names from two pieces of Voices commentary in the past four years. (Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”)
The first, in 2009, was when I reprinted a local blog post that recounted with sardonic humor and thoughtful detail what it was like to work in the freezer at a local food wholesale operation.
The writer had to sign nondisclosure agreements, which he was probably breaking by publishing his memoir in the form of his blog and - more overtly in the local public eye - when portions of that blog were reprinted in our pages.
The second time was in 2010, when a Windham County woman came to us with her story of being scammed by an overseas con artist on an online dating service. She would not let us publish it with her name but begged us to get it into print to sound a warning about the potential deception to older people who were new to the venue of online dating and its associated risks.
In this unusual case, I thought it would be a valuable public service.
Would I have preferred full names and towns for both these pieces? Of course. I believe that they give the writing more context, more substance, more credibility. But in each case, that wasn't an option. And in each case, neither piece was appreciably lessened by not knowing who wrote it.
The bottom line: our use of anonymous commentary will be most rare, but logical and always in the best interests of our readers. It won't ever be a scrim to hide writers so they can throw bombs.
Readers might ask why we should be the ones who make that call. That is exactly what we do for every piece that gets into the paper in the first place, so why should comments be different?
So, NoWayInVermont, let us know who you are; we keep these secrets with professional, ironclad confidence. At least tell us what's on your mind.
Given your anxiety and strong feelings about this topic and how strongly this piece touched a nerve for you, I have a feeling that you have some good reasons for wanting discretion.
Maybe time will tell.