Washington Post Fumbles The Future
As just another example of old school media screwing up their attempt to gradually reinvent themsleves as social media institutions, the Washington Post has disabled comments on their ombudsman's, Deborah Howell's blog:
[from washingtonpost.blog - The Editors Talk About Site Policies, Design and Goals]
But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.
So, instead of simply moderating the comments -- all of us do that, of course -- these guys move back into the pleistocene. It's not a blog without comments, it's not social media without dialog. Just install the plug-in guys!
[pointer from Susan Mernit, who is a really smart person, but she says "I admire the way Jim and the Post are handling this?" Huh?]
Psst! Just when you thought Deborah Howell erased all evidence of comments on the WaPo Blog as reported by the Drudge Report do you realize that those search engine bots worked faster than she did in trying to blink them out of existence. Not to mention a couple of blog sites that got some of the earlier and later blog comments archived.
http://kokonutpundits.blogspot.com/2006/01/deborah-howell-failed-to-get-rid-of.html
Posted by: mcconnell | January 20, 2006 at 12:50 PM