At AnnArbor.com, we're committed to cultivating an online community where real conversations take place on local issues. We built our news and information site to be interactive and intuitive. You'll find lots of places within AnnArbor.com to talk to us and each other.
As such, we're fully aware moderation of the comments and public posts on our site has to be strong. And if there's one thing we've heard loud and clear from the Ann Arbor area community, it's that people want us to moderate conversations on AnnArbor.com.
We've said before that we'd like conversations on our site to be relevant and free of personal attacks and insults. Today, we're unveiling the guidelines we plan to use to help encourage useful and constructive comments and posts on our site.
We've spent countless hours wrestling with how to moderate the comments on AnnArbor.com. We looked at how other news organizations do it, ranging from The Christian Science Monitor to The New York Times to SportsJournalists.com. We looked at how other online communities do it from Arbor Update to Boing Boing and MetaFilter.
Our guidelines will evolve. We'll let you know as we make changes and why we made those changes on our About Us page. We chose to keep the guidelines simple and straightforward, rather than detail every possible circumstance where moderation could be needed.
Here is the policy we'll use:
AnnArbor.com Conversation Guidelines
AnnArbor.com aims to provide a lively community forum where readers can talk to us and talk to each other - in a neighborly way, of course. The best comments and posts are those that add more information to the story, express a different viewpoint or help create intelligent debate. We welcome constructive debate on our site but we won't tolerate jerks. Don't be that guy - avoid comments or posts that are off-topic, offensive, contain personal attacks or those that don't further the conversation. We encourage everyone who registers on our site to use their real name, or at least a consistent screen name. We reserve the right to pre-moderate comments and delete or edit comments.
Members of our staff will monitor comments and posts on AnnArbor.com throughout the day. We're also contracting with an outside company that will help monitor our site, especially during the night and early morning hours. We're also looking at easy ways for the community to see the stream of comments and posts as they come out, via RSS or Twitter, so that when breaking news happens in the comments, there's a way to find it fast.
We'll have a moderation team at AnnArbor.com that will have a strategy and make operational decisions about comments and posts on the site. The team will meet regularly to review and revise our guidelines and update our internal policies.
We plan to be nimble and transparent - and, as mentioned earlier, we'll discuss changes on our About Us page. We think it's important for our community to know about the issues we're struggling with and how we come to make our decisions.
When will we see what this online paper will look like or is this it. This site is very boring.
Angela,
Our Web site launches on Monday, July 20.
Stefanie Murray
Community Director, AnnArbor.com
I've got to agree with Angela. As of today I can't imagine being a frequent viewer.
Will this be news or blog? It is a fine line you walk. Kind of like the definition of pornography, I can't really define it but I know it when I see it. Please don't become just another blog site.
Stefanie: I hope people are civil, but I have seen enough newspaper msg boards to know that discourse can degenerate faster than the air quality at a Green Day concert.
As a consumer and former reporter, I don't see the problem in holding all posts pending review and approval. Just one man's opinion.
Hi Terry,
Our new site will look nothing like this placeholder blog. It will launch on Monday July 20.
And to Rob, I absolutely understand your point and we talked about it. We actually changed this blog to be in pre-moderation mode for a time when we found folks impersonating other people. At this point, we're going to let comments go up and we'll moderate them from there on the soon-to-be-launched AnnArbor.com. We will continually evaluate our policy and change it as necessary, however.
Stefanie Murray
Community Director, AnnArbor.com
I really hope you didn't use Sj.com as a place to get ideas from. Cranky sportswriters are not good test subjects.
moderation is good to an extent
Lots of strange moderation decisions so far. Lots of allowing anonymous people to dictate the comments. Not much thought.
Also, the fastest way to spot a non-thinker is to see a comment like: "This site is really boring." Anyone can say that with no thought. Fast way to criticize without knowing much.
All of those types of comments should be deleted. People who can't or won't think shouldn't control any thread.
I sincerely wish you luck moderating comments - hope you can get all to play nice in the sandbox. Resist the urge to moderate some comments more vigorously because of politics. Less elegant (but not vulgar) ideas sometimes get piled on and the 'hatespeech' label applied.
Pardon my pessimism, but creating guidelines for controlling freedom of speech is at a minimum, suspicious. The buzz word “transparency,” so liberally thrown around at annarbor.com has a much different meaning than the Oxford Dictionary:
"Having the property of transmitting rays of light through its substance so that bodies situated beyond or behind can be distinctly seen."
Such guidelines have been crafted to insure that any opinion reflecting negatively toward the best interest of annarbor.com will be hidden. Such guidelines have been crafted to insure that strategically determined agendas of annarbor.com can be executed.
What’s most obvious to the educated consumer is the actual transparency of the public relationship spin job being conducted by annarbor.com. Just be honest about your motives.
Thanks, deeday. As a media company focused on strong, watchdog journalism, protecting freedom of speech is something we completely believe in.
Moderating comments on a Web site is a separate issue from freedom of speech. If you have spent any time reading comments on various forms of content across the Internet, you'll see that often times comments that aren't moderated devolve into discussions filled with name-calling and personal attacks that have nothing to do with the topic. By moderating comments and unpublishing those that violate our guidelines, we want to keep the conversation civil. Some folks have compared it in some ways to the way that letters to the editor are moderated at traditional print newspapers. Our goal is to promote debate and eliminate unsubstantiated name-calling. Nearly every online media organization has a comment moderation policy. It's necessary in today's world.
Stefanie Murray
Community Director, AnnArbor.com
I agree with Stefanie. Freedom of Speech doesn't enter the picture here, as this is private property. The owners have the right to restrict or allow as they desire.
We must understand that comment sections and forums can never approach the characteristics of in-person discussion, and they will always be far from perfect. The purpose of comment and forum sections of a for-profit news site are the same as the purpose of company itself: to generate income. The goal is to generate more page views, which will lead to to more mouse clicks on advertising. This is how they make money. It's not an altruistic endeavor.
Different mediums tend to draw different kinds of people.
Doubtless plenty of educated and cultured people live in Ann Arbor, but in my experience the people who post on news and blog sites are like hit and run drivers. As soon as you diverge from their beliefs, they mow you down and they never stop.
So why come here when you could enjoy more civil conversation over dinner at one of Ann Arbor's fine restaurants or a friend's house?
Happy cultivating.
Oh come on, Ann Arborites have a lot to say and darn it, want it heard! I point to www.nola.com whose comments are twice as much fun as the articles themselves and everyone seems to be able to get on with their lives. Are we all scared of ruffling up some feathers?
If we're truly worried, perhaps a system like Gawker Media's where crowdsourced thumbs-down system merely lighten the text of the comment, to the point of illegibility as I doubt the editors and writers of this site want to sit there all day questioning whether banter over cupcakes is worth censoring or not...
Please use Bold Black fonts.
The Blue fades out on my computer and is hard to read.
I am concerned with the prevalence of certain Ann Arbor people to hijack web sites and open forums to present very one sided positions and falsehoods. For example, what will AnnArbor.com do to prevent those people who seem to always give misinformation to the Ann Arbor City Council and conduct weekly protest outside a certain synagogue from hijacking the comments on every article about Israel or Jewish issues for there own one-sided perspectives?
Ann Arborite, I've read those comments too, and I know that those discussions happen not only on a few local web sites but on sites all over the net and in public places.
We have set down guidelines, and intend to follow them, mindful that keeping a reasonable discussion going may include being selective about what is published as a comment (just as a newspaper is selective about what it prints as a letter to the editor).
As to "one sided perspectives", I fully expect that people with strong opinions on issues all over town will express their own opinions online as they do in email and on their own web sites and in person. I don't expect every commenter to see all three or four sides of a story and be objective about it in their own comments - that's asking too much. There have in the past been cases where a small group of people have created multiple temporary and false identities to chatter among themselves to take over a forum topic, and that I particularly want to avoid.
I hope to see a wide variety of comments regarding stories shared on here. And I believe that will happen with time. No doubt you will have a few bad apples in the bunch like all other things on the web. But so far I like the interactivity that the staff has so far with the post comments. All the best to AnnArbor.com. Stefanie thanks again for the articles and emails back and forth about the Saline plant. I see you have fit in very well here already
As expected, several comments were submitted to this item which we did not choose to post, not because they were one sided, but because they were not relevant to the topic at hand.
Strong opinions, strongly held, are fine. I expect there will be disagreement. But if you want to make a comment, please keep it on topic, and don't simply cut and paste the same text you have pasted into every other submit box peripherally related to it everywhere on the net.
I'm glad to see there will be some moderation of comments, and I'm sure experience will reveal what techniques provide the best balance between opening up dialogue and reducing off-topic comments or "hijacked" conversations. I think figuring this balance out is going to be one of the big questions in web design over the next few years.
On a practical level, what about presentation and placement of reader contributions? Will all reader contributions get placed onto the same buffet table, where readers browse through and pick whatever strikes their fancy? Will the editors highlight certain comments? Who chooses, and by what criteria, what user-generated content makes it into the print edition, or merits prime real estate on the site?
Still at an early stage, I think that you at annarbor.com are at least heading in the right direction - particularly with regard to moderating forum posts.
That is, all one has to do is observe the thousands of online fora to see that there is such a thing as "too much freedom." Freedom without good judgement and a sense of responsibility can be disastrous.
Given that one pillar of annarbor.com's policy is to do what's good for Ann Arbor, there can be no valid argument for posting vilifications of individuals or our community. It remains for all of us to develop the wisdom and ability to distinguish legitimate criticisms and disagreements on substantive issues from time-wasting, offensive forum graffiti.
We should all be very interested in seeing annarbor.com become a success - and we will be responsible for its success or failure.