Ventura County Star disables reader comments after racist comments, profanity

Via latimes.com: The Ventura County Star closed down its online reader bulletin board Wednesday after too many inappropriate posts about race and immigration. The paper is looking for software to help with the monitoring efforts and hopes to reopen the comments feature soon, according to the Star's John Moore, assistant managing editor for new media and technology.

The comments feature on Ventura County Star stories is an example of how newspapers across the country "are wrestling with similar issues amid shifting expectations about how information is delivered and changing attitudes about the public's role as both news consumer and purveyor," said the Times. The shut down is an example of the difficulties newspapers sometimes face when they open readers' forums: "' ... even people on the cutting edge of this new culture are struggling with how far they can extend that kind of open mike,'" said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington D.C.-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.

[Update at 9:15 a.m. on 5.23.05: The Washington Post, in an article about the growing pains of so-called citizen journalism, reports that the Star has reopened its reader forums even though the news item about taking them down still appears on its front page.]