Online comments: racist, idiotic completely useless...and bad for journalism

I've found that many of the most wild comments come from people who know their audience and go to the extreme to get a rise out of people.

Fan of Local U makes a comment on story about how crappy State U is. Or vice versa.

Most of the comments result in a pissing contest between people who cannot agree to disagree.

 

There you go.

People are way more willing to rip into others or spout off about stuff with usernames. Make them use real names? All that badassness goes flyin' out the window.

 

But this is so absurd. It is affecting our jobs when people won't be quoted or have their pictures taken because of anonymous comments. I must work in a negative part of the country or something, but virtually every story we write in sports ends up being full of mean comments about the writer or the newspaper, or somebody in the story.
Again, who gives a fuck about clicks when integrity is at stake? This is ridiculous. If the writers could fight back and tell these anonymous freeloaders to fuck off, it'd be different. But we're not allowed to. The "reactions and interactivity" is a myth, at least here. The comments are just racist or insulting. They are really cheapening the industry.

And as far as this comment: "Comments are one way of being interactive. Maybe not the best, but if that's the case then we should be looking into a less explosive method of interactivity. Tweak the system. Bend the rules in your favor. Find a way to make it work. Don't just give up. There are options beyond a blanket response."
Newspapers either are too cheap or simply won't monitor the comments. It's like the print edition is edited meticulously and taken great care to not offend anybody with cuss words. But the comments? You can criticize the dead; you can bury the writer; you can bury the fat source in the story. I am amazed by our profession and what we've allowed to happen. This is slimy and cheap.

 

As I said on another thread on here about online comments, the thing that really annoys me is when the paper won't allow its own employees to respond when the commenters are poking fun at them.

Any other industry wouldn't tolerate their employees being harassed by their customers. Yet the newspaper industry flat-out encourages it.

Maybe a harassment lawsuit or two against a newspaper by an employee would do the trick.

 

This is so true.
Somebody asked why?
It's anonymity. That is why. The bully mentality, all that. When you don't have to put your real name and nobody knows it's you, it brings out the anger in a person and the pure idocy of people.
They can be racist. Nobody knows who is saying it.

What person would write on a story that a 17 year old kid basically deserves to die in a truck accident getting thrown from the bed? Nobody would do it if they had to write their real name.
Look, we post our email addresses and phone numbers and rarely if ever does anybody contact us. Why? We'd see their real email addy and/or they'd have to speak with us on the phone.

The bottom line is newspapers are not willing to monitor comments. Hopefully there will be some kind of major lawsuit or 10 and at least all those court costs will make newspapers dump the comments.
Why would Mazda of Minneapolis have a website and have a comment section where readers could criticize the salespeople, the cars, the repair shop, etc?
Answer? They WOULDN'T. WHy do we? For web traffic.
At least this thread has reminded me to stop reading the comments. Finally I promise myself I won't read them any more. Like the Minneapolis writer says it wants me to leave the business. Every story we write can't be as bad as these commenters suggest.

 

It's gotten to the point at our paper that anything tweeted is given added importance.

Could be innocuous, or stupid, or have terrible grammar. But Dwayne Wade tweeted it, so we must publish it.

 

Funny thing is at a lot of shops the people making these "hip" decisions with reader comments and twitter, etc., are old farts. 60-70 years old. These publishers (old) who for years resisted idiocy in the name of "journalism" have given in. Nobody had any true vision. It's all or nothing and they've bought into this Internet is everything crap. Bad businessmen/women here.
Maybe the old farts want the business to fail since they are about done anyway. How else can you explain this crap we've been going through?

 

Bingo. Management doesn't fully realize what effect moronic, imbecile posters will have on a department. Thankfully, since we now charge for online content, comments are down considerably, though that's a whole other issue in itself.

I just don't see the point of them. If we had 25-30 comments on any particular story, maybe 5 TOPS were positive. The others were just downright ugly and an embarrassment of the city and the (apparently) many dolts that live in it.