Orange County Register row illustrates risk of anonymous comments

A slew of nasty comments on a website article provokes a sharp response from newsroom staffers.

Posted: 2007-03-14

Kevin Roderick's LA Observed reports the details of the controversy at the Orange County Register over anonymous reader comments posted to the Register's website.

A story about an obese mother elicited many nasty comments, provoking a sharp response from print-side Register staffers. Now the paper's diversity committee has asked the editor to suspend reader Web comments entirely.

Other papers have been through this before. The Washington Post had a meltdown over comments appended to an erroneous ombudsman's column last year. After that incident, Vin Crosbie reviewed the history of anonymity in journalism and applied those lessons to the issues at stake online in a thoughtful post republished on OJR.

What's frustrating to me is to see news organizations, businesses that have been managing content successfully for decades, continue to struggle with reader interactivity even though individual webheads, publishing sites from their living rooms, figured this out years ago. Forget committees. Why not just hire one of them?

Responses:

From Barry Parr on March 19, 2007 at 11:24 AM

After shifting from anonymous and unmoderated comments to real-name moderated comments on Coastsider, I wouldn't go back. I occasionally have to reject good comments from people who won't bother to register under their real names. But I now have thoughtful and informative conversations between identifiable community members on my site.

Perhaps some folks in the news business really do think the public are all idiots and that angry blather is all we're capable of.

From Noah Barron on March 20, 2007 at 12:33 AM

Yikes. A "diversity committee" sounds a bit spooky for a newspaper.

Also, is that a typo or did you just invent the best portmanteau word ever: "combudsman" as in dot-combudsman?

I'm going to hope it's the latter.

From Robert Niles on March 21, 2007 at 11:35 AM

Fixed the typo. (Though I reserve the right to use that word in the future!)

From Travis Henry on March 21, 2007 at 5:16 PM

I agree with Barry. I know we lose a lot of traffic and postings by requiring people to use their real names on Denver's YourHub.com, but it allows for good discussion and a civil atmosphere. I'll fight for anyone's right to say pretty much anything they please as long as they have the fortitude to stand behind their words with their real name. Could someone slip through the cracks using a false name? Sure. But we knock out a lot of spammers and nasty comments with our policy.

From Jon Garfunkel on March 26, 2007 at 9:33 PM

re:
"What's frustrating to me is to see news organizations, businesses that have been managing content successfully for decades, continue to struggle with reader interactivity even though individual webheads, publishing sites from their living rooms, figured this out years ago."

I cannot explain why publications fail to heed the lesson that Vin articulated last year. It seems to me that this is largely a problem of scale-- with many people writing comments, it is more likely for these sorts of frictional problems to happen, much more than for "individual webheads publishing from their living rooms."