Robb Montgomery

Am reading Mark Glaser’s excellent post on “Elevating the content online” and have bookmarked a couple passages that I am going to use in future social network training that I do with editors and publishers.

One of the biggest issues newspaper editors and publishers have had in serving online communities has been the roadblocks they, themselves, erected out of fear.

“For people who grew up in another era, it’s a much different way of looking at things,” David Ardia, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the director of the new Citizen Media Law Project said. “In newspapers, the publisher is responsible for everything whether it’s a letter to the editor or a classified ad. That’s been the standard of liability for a long time. There’s a real learning process in the new liability terrain…You do see the courts showing discomfort because it doesn’t feel fair to them. There are these feelings amongst traditional news organizations that this feels strange and unfair. It’s taking some time to settle in.”

Yes, and meanwhile MySpace and Google groups, and ning and . . . Topix.net are hosting the discussions with your communities and are seeing all of the ad revenue.

“One of the big arguments in the debate over moderating online comments is that if you start to edit people’s comments before publishing them, you open yourself up to liability in defamation cases. It turns out that’s not actually true. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was largely struck down by the courts, but one important part that remained, Section 230, protects online services from liability for people’s comments even if they are edited prior to publication. The only time a service might become liable is if editors change the meaning of the post and make it libelous.“

I made the last part bold. I didn’t change the meaning - just the emphasis.
For four years the moderators of Visual Editors have wrestled with how to handle hot threads. One of the early policies was to ban anonymous members who comment from the shadows. A real name policy works for a global journalism think tank based on peer-to-peer education and many-to-many discussions of current events, editing strategies and controversial issues.

Anonymous name use has its place - certainly for people living in societies that punish freedom of expression or when hosting discussions of minors but not much else, it turns out.

Mark’s article is a good read and hopefully will spur a more enlightened editing class at newspapers to better identify and develop forums with a people-first mentality instead of a lawyer-first one.