The Public Editor: Self-policed online posts reflect ever-evolving Web

It's been almost two weeks since sacbee.com began allowing readers to automatically and instantly self-post comments about stories without any of the previous prescreening by editors.

The sky has not fallen. The First Amendment remains intact. The raucous ruckus of anonymous Internet debate gets a little louder.

And the rolling experiment continues.

The Bee's history of online reader comments is a short one, not quite two years since they were launched in the spring of 2006.

The Bee was one of the first large papers in the country to allow readers to attach comments to stories. The practice is now common throughout the newspaper industry.

As is the continued hand-wringing.

Too often the online conversation at papers across the country sank into the gutter. Racial and ethnic bile was thick. Stereotyping was common. Civil and rigorous debate was replaced by obscene venting.

Unfortunately, much of that continues today.

Just in the past several weeks, for example, the Chicago Tribune shut down its Internet comment boards for all its political stories.

It did the same thing for an opinion column about Muslims and for a story about the Illinois governor.

The reason was that anonymous reader rants crossed the line.

Other papers also have been forced to temporarily push the "off" button.

The Bee has not been immune to similar loathsome comments and has struggled to balance its traditional newspaper standards of accuracy, verification and accountability with the almost-anything-goes, free-form ethos of the Internet.

Last year, the paper was on the cusp of eliminating anonymous postings and replacing them with a requirement that those commenting be identified by name.

As a quid pro quo, the time-consuming task of having editors pre-screen comments would have been abolished.

The paper's resources were spread so thin that sometimes it took hours for editors to approve comments and post them, undermining one of the main reasons for having online comments to begin with: immediacy and quick give-and-take among readers.

Now the paper has changed its mind again, in part due to a change of top editors, in part to changing Internet realities, in part to the huge popularity of online commenting, and in part to the recognition that nothing in this realm is static.

Some newspaper and magazine Web sites, in fact, are now highlighting the best reader comments, with BusinessWeek.com, for instance, putting the best comment of the day on its home page.

Others, such as USAToday.com, post commenters' digital photos or their symbols, similar to what you see on MySpace.com.

And some media companies allow for self-posting, as The Bee does now, while others, such as The New York Times, have editors screen each post before publishing them.

There is no uniformity.

The Bee's new system is essentially based on reader self-policing. It is up to readers to flag comments they find inappropriate. Only then will editors intervene and decide whether a comment should be restored.

In return, reader comments will be posted immediately. The soft spot here is that inappropriate comments will be posted for all to see until they are flagged and removed.

"We are going to let the community help us police that (inappropriate) behavior," said Ken Chavez, assistant managing editor for interactive media.

Part of the test, Chavez explained, is whether "the audience will accept the fact these (inappropriate comments) will go up until someone flags it, because that's part of the system."

The Bee has come up with eight flagging categories. These are in addition to existing software used to filter profanity, racial epithets, etc.

The flagging categories are:

Offensive (sexually explicit or offensive language, hate speech, threats); trolling (intending to annoy or offend other posters); flaming (contains insults to users); illegal activities (promotes cracked software and other illegal activities); off-topic posting (includes topics clearly outside the scope of discussion); disruptive posting (messages in ALL CAPS, large blank posts, hard-to-read posts, etc.); and spam.

And there's another simply labeled "other," which allows readers to explain their reasons for wanting a comment removed.

Chavez emphasized that the intent is to allow robust dialogue and that comments will be removed only if they violate the rules, not just because someone disagrees with them.

"We will be pretty liberal in what people can say," he said.

Commenters will be suspended or banished from the system if either they routinely post flagrantly offensive comments or if they routinely flag comments without good reasons for doing so.

Although the comments remain anonymous, readers are still required to register by name onto sacbee.com's system, and the paper has a record of their IP address.

So far, Chavez said, the new feature is working.

Surprisingly, few comments have been flagged.

During one recent weekday period, for example, from about 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., only two comments were flagged.

One explanation could be that people aren't aware of the new system.

Given the high volume of comments, though, it's more likely that this growing online community's expectations are different.

It's an audience that accepts and participates in hot-flash debate of the moment and all the messy highlights and lowlights that entails.

Those who take part don't seem too concerned or even cognizant of the trampled-on journalistic traditions that make newspaper people fret.

It's the readers' medium, too, now more than ever.

What's your opinion? Send me your comments, and I will post them online at the Public Editor's forum.

To participate, please go to www.sacbee.com/public.

About the writer:

• The Public Editor deals with complaints and concerns about The Sacramento Bee's content. His opinions are his own. You can contact the Public Editor by mail at P.O. Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852; or by calling him directly at (916) 321-1250.