As I have mentioned before, one of the unexpected changes in my thinking since becoming publisher of TheBurg is my view of local media. Where I was once merely an avid consumer, I am now, with this column, a monthly producer of sorts. The added duty has caused me to think about local online and print media in new and different ways.
Far from making local media irrelevant, online social media seems to have enhanced individualized stories in the regional community. Anyone on Twitter or Facebook cannot help but notice the local stories of the day, week or month. Checking your Twitter feed or Facebook page will gain you instant knowledge of what your friends are thinking about. Much of it is hyper-local and great for real-world social gatherings. Keeping a close eye on what is happening in the local press certainly helps local media distribution, even if you don’t purchase or even read the actual publication.
I find myself checking our statistics at theburgnews.com to see which articles have drawn the most interest based on viewership, sharing or posting on social media. While not an infallible guide to determining the relative merits of any one article, the amount of uptake gives at least some indication of how receptive you, our readers, have been to the story. Our writers are generally grateful each time some one takes the time to tell their cyber-friends (and/or actual friends) to check out this or “like” that article that they have written. This is clearly a good thing from a media-owner perspective. Non-readers become readers because their friends are easily able to share a story with them with the click of a keyboard or tap on their phone.
On the other hand, it is very hard to get any one local story to break through to more widespread awareness. The numbers are just not sufficiently large to achieve critical mass. Readers are too few and the stories too many, and focus is fragmented at best. This has led to the well-publicized crisis on the business side of local media that has experienced dramatically declining ad sales as a result of that fractured audience. In an effort to reverse this trend and stay in business, much of the focus has shifted to how many people are viewing and interacting with the content. This chase for online eyeballs and, thus, the ability to charge advertisers, has led to many changes, like fewer days of print publication, among other things.
The worst of these developments, in my opinion, is the advent of the ubiquitous anonymous commentator immediately following the online article. I believe that the practice of allowing anonymous comments, far from being a panacea for declining ad sales and tightening budgets, actually serves to hasten a publication’s decline. A factual, rational story is easily overwhelmed by the non-factual, irrational opinion that follows. This commentary lessens and cheapens the very product that is being produced by the writer, while stretching and stressing that person, who now has to respond and defend her reporting to the uninformed. More work for less pay rarely makes for happy employees, but certainly tends to increase actual errors as time and volume pressures mount.
Let’s take our local friends in big suburban media. There is perhaps nothing more simultaneously entertaining and disheartening, yet meaningless and time wasting, as watching a writer who has published a well-researched piece go online and try to defend the article against the anonymous commentators. As a teaching psychologist friend once told me, “Rational argument is a useless tool against the irrational”—it only makes you crazy. Proof of that maxim can be found in nearly every one of these so-called forums. I feel for the writer who thought she had chosen a career in journalism with the local paper and now realizes that it is far more “Lord of The Flies” than the Wall Street Journal (the WSJ now requires real names in its commentary).
There is simply no point in engaging in combative back and forth with someone who doesn’t want to be informed or for whom the facts do not matter. For many of them, it appears that the game is very different—it is to rant and rage for their own personal enjoyment, not to enhance knowledge or even to prove a rational point. When a commentator is anonymous, there is no social check in place to restrain ignorance or need to fear damage to a personal reputation by writing things online that one would never say in person or if identified personally in the real-world town square.
Let’s be clear: There are exactly zero, as in bagel, whistleblowers or the like in the online local media forums that admittedly would deserve anonymity if they did have actually pertinent information. The “whistleblower exception” is easily preserved not by posting online, but by sending the information to a responsible reporter, who can then actually report a story. Anonymous online commentary is clearly not that.
The fix, however, appears to be simple. The requirement should be for a verified e-mail and physical address with the person’s name, age and occupation. Requiring a person to identify herself or himself and stand behind the comment would bring great social pressure to be more dignified and respectful, if not articulate and informed. Simply put, it is requiring the same level of social decorum that we demand in person. A simple request for civility, it would seem.
For these reasons, TheBurg has made the decision not to allow online commentary on our articles. The articles speak for themselves; they are valuable and took time to research and write. We welcome your letters, e-mail, social media posts, etc., whether positive or negative. If you let us know your thoughts, we may share them more generally with other readers. If you have suggestions for improving our paper, we will gladly listen and try to do so.
However, the real danger in anonymous commentary is the demeaning of our public discourse and the rise of a forum for the exceedingly small minority of aggrieved and disaffected who crowd out the rest of us who actually like where we live and work. Those vocal few are not representative of the community, but they are a great impediment to a truly informed citizenry by spreading inaccuracy and misinformation and just for uselessly wasting time. Ultimately, after this online experiment has played out, I believe that advertisers and the community generally will see all this anonymous commentary for what it is: sound and fury, signifying nothing. Let’s hope it is brought to an end locally, before it further threatens the viability of our otherwise valuable local media outlets.
J. Alex Hartzler is publisher of TheBurg.
