Published: October 18, 2009 03:37 am      

Should news organizations police online comments?

College 401

PALESTINE — A horrible incident occurred on the UT campus this past week. On Monday, it was made known that a student jumped to his death from the seventh floor of a parking garage in west campus. It was quickly ascertained via surveillance video and other means that he was not pushed and it was indeed a suicide. Apparently, in an even more shocking turn of events, he had been texting with one of his friends, the same friend that eventually called 9-1-1 after the incident happened. He told her several times that he was going to “end it all.” My thoughts go out to the student's family, as well as the friend, who no doubt has an awful weight on her shoulders for the rest of her life.

As unfortunate as the situation was, the more gruesome and disgusting details came about the next day, when the story was posted on the Daily Texan's web site. The story itself was well done and as sensitive as is possible for stories like this. The comments on the web site, however, were not. I won't dignify any of the statements by repeating them, but I can tell you that they were extremely disrespectful, insanely rude, and if karma is an actual force, then the people who wrote those things better watch their back.

It brought up an interesting dilemma that journalists are facing everywhere, and one that we will talking about soon in my news editing class. Are comments online worthwhile, and if so, how do you police them? Personally, I think that allowing comments on stories on the Internet is a no-brainer, and something that should most certainly be implemented by every news organization online, if it isn't already. Comments allow readers to further interact with the journalist and the community at large that is also reading the same story they are. The journalist who wrote the story can later go back and check the comments to see how readers felt, and sometimes those readers will even offer suggestions or ideas that the writer can take and use in future pieces.

The problem, however, comes from those insulting jerks who wrote the inappropriate comments on the story about the UT student. While comments should most certainly be allowed, they should also definitely be policed. This is where it gets hard. News organizations are already struggling with how to continue putting out news in spite of decreasing profits and revenues, and none of them want to expend the money it would require to hire someone to do nothing but read comments all day, deleting the inappropriate ones and leaving the okay ones. But, if you're going to allow comments, you have to police them somehow. The Boston Globe basically lets the readers handle this, offering a “report this comment” button on all user generated statements, and if a commenter sees something he or she doesn't like, that person can simply click the button and an editor will take a look at it.

But say the only commenters on a story are all exactly the same as the rude people from the Texan story. If this was the case, they would all probably find each other's ridiculously awful statements as funny, and none of them would hit the report button, so an editor wouldn't see them. Then later, a new reader comes along, sees these comments, and is immediately and forever turned off of that news organization because of the lack of professionalism and quality they saw on the site. It's a conundrum, I'm not denying that, and it's definitely not the easiest problem in the world to fix, but something should surely be done. I think, even in spite of decreasing profits, news organizations have to take the responsibility of at least having someone - even if it's an intern - constantly reading comments and policing their site, because you never know when a situation is going to arise in which people forget what it means to be decent and civil, and when that happens, it can forever ruin the credibility of any media organization

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Robert Rich is a senior journalism major at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from Westwood High School in 2006. He can be reached via e-mail at robert.rich@mail.utexas.edu