Cleaning up the online neighborhood

The News & Observer recently took a small step toward more civility in the blogosphere. The paper's online gurus quietly banned publication of anonymous reader comments to the blogs on the Web site www.newsobserver.com.

If you're not familiar with the blogs, they are online items written by reporters and editors to engage readers in discussion of the news. At their best, blogs can be enlightening exchanges of opinion on the issues of the day, great and small.

But the 33 blogs sometimes can be unsavory neighborhoods with language that offends the sensibilities of decent people. Racism, xenophobia and other ills of society, fueled by raw-emotion topics like politics and sports, sometimes infect the discourse. The most egregious comments often come from people whose identities are not known to The N&O.

So, shortly after the election, the online staff banned anonymous comments, and now the computer blocks posts to blogs from unregistered people. Rachel Carter, interactive sports producer, said there were two reasons for the change.

One was to eliminate spam that was creeping into the blogs. Commercial spammers were using the anonymity doorway to inject obnoxious messages into the conversation.

The other objective was to relieve staff of the burden of monitoring the blogs. Carter, who had become the de facto decency police, said the paper was receiving 300 to 400 comments a day, which was consuming an hour to two hours of her time. "I don't think any of us were ever comfortable with allowing anonymity," she said.

Eliminating anonymous comments doesn't mean commenters have to use their real names. Many use pseudonyms -- "Big Picture" and "Sideburns" were two last week -- but to participate they must register with the newspaper, giving their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, ZIP codes, ages and gender.

That means we know who you are, which seems to discourage extreme talk. "They tend to be a lot more well-behaved," Carter said. She said the volume of blog comments had declined some since the change, but the tone has improved.

The bloggery is one of several rooms in The N&O online house where people can make comments. Readers also can respond directly to stories online, and the comment traffic has shifted increasingly to the stories since that feature was enabled in June. Dan Barkin, senior editor for online, says the paper has received more than 29,000 comments from more than 5,700 people since then. Only registered users can comment on stories. (There's a separate online provision for submitting a letter to the editor, which does not require registration.)

Readers have a new place to make comments on The N&O's Facebook site.

Then there are the forums on share.triangle.com, the paper's community site, where editors regularly invite readers to post their opinions on items in the news. Anonymous comments still are allowed there, and I saw some disturbing discussion last week on a question about the "free expression tunnel" at N.C. State University, including an offensively derogatory reference to the president of the state NAACP. Maybe it's The N&O's fault for asking the question.

The whole matter of online reader comment is a dilemma for The News & Observer, as it is for all newspapers. The name of the game in online publishing is attracting readers, and the more mouse clicks a site gets, the more valuable it is to advertisers.

There is real value in fostering interactivity with readers -- giving them more voice in the public forum that newspapers assemble. And some case can be made for anonymity. Teachers, for example, are deterred from participating in the education blog, says schools reporter Keung Hui, by the prospect of being publicly identified.