— by Lin McNulty, Managing Editor —
A few years back, Orcas Issues made the decision to incorporate reader comments on our stories posted. Since then, a number of remarkable things have occurred. For the most part, we embraced it and even built your comments into our brand: Orcas Issues: Voice of the Orcas Community.
There have been some sticky situations in moderating those comments, and we even wondered at various points if we should moderate them at all. It became apparent to us, and those who read Orcas Issues, that commenting had perhaps become challenging to keep on top of. Most comments do not come to us for approval before being posted; it can be a full-time monitoring job for someone to make sure we read each comment as it comes in and that it isn’t getting out of control (whatever that means).
Not to mention the times that comments are posted while our staff takes time off to sleep (and eat). And that’s what happened yesterday while I was doing the evening meal thing. Three commenters expressed, in turn, their concerns about the actual story, and then their beef with the other commenters, as well as problems with the “recent bias of journalism” at Orcas Issues with the departure of Margie Doyle. (I’ll be contacting that person to try to understand what’s behind that.)
We don’t have to allow the ability to comment on our site. With just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, we can wipe that scourge from our system. But I don’t want to! Our readers who comment add a level of involvement that pleases me greatly. It excites the site.
So let’s do this. Click here to take a brief reader survey and share your opinion. What should we do? As the voice of the Orcas community, tell us what you think.
As Editor, you gotta edit.
If someone uses extreme or unnecessary profanity, it’s gotta come out. If someone sinks to an ad-hominem attack, it’s gotta be deleted. It’s even appropriate to correct misspellings, bad grammar, and malapropisms (but please leave in my “gotta”s).
But, other than that, every comment deserves to be read. Every opinion deserves to be heard. Censorship and thought control have no place in our society.
This community has under the benign monarchy of Margie and Lin, evolved a means of discussing many sensitive topics in a generally civil and respectful manner.
I believe the blog-ware employed by this site has been a good safeguard against most misuse, and the editorial policy, such as one can tell, has evolved. I do think that being effectively On-Call 24/7 is above your calling. There is nothing that must be said in that time frame. A more reasonable approach could be to set “office hours” and cut off the actual posting of comments during certain hours, to allow you to review on your own schedule.. sortof a hybrid situation between the blogosphere and traditional publications.
The problem IMHO, is that the buffering of public comment in a way that allows cooler heads to prevail has failed, to the provable detriment of this Democracy! In the past this has erred on the side of allowing the media to censor public discourse. However, I understand that in the early days of this republic, printed newspapers were left in the local pub for folks to comment in the margins. There was in effect a group editing of content because everyone knew everyone and you could run into them later for a face-to-face.
I find it a privilege to participate in the Orcas Issues blog experience because of the “community of voices” effect here. I wish the “Edit” function would return because even after careful review I am still mortified at times by finding the ungrammatical there-their-they’re in my work or an important missing clarifying comma. But overall the discipline of writing for a thoughtful audience has improved my writing and hopefully my/our ideas.
Orcas Issues blog has I think helped counter the prevailing control of locally acceptable ideas by folks that em, “over-appreciate” their place in this community by unethical means, effectively constricting discourse about important topics like our healthcare or local governance or who gets to talk about what/whom with impunity. Many of these folks simply do not DARE* to express themselves in a forum they do not “own” ..like for example secret “Executive Sessions” of nonprofits we ALL presumably own as public corporations but have ended up accountable to no one but a few cronies who don’t even dare to post their pics during election season.
thanks Lin
Yes, by all means sort out posts the next day. This has got to be a tough gig but it does provide those of us who don’t do social media a way of gauging the conversation and temperament of our neighbors.
Thanks for taking that on.
hmmm… i left a comment here -as innocuous as possible – it got removed. May I ask why?