I saw that Daniel Meyer is going to be a Hardline guest this morning on WBEN.
Dan is a newspaper guy in the form of editor for The Hamburg Sun and a columnist for Weekly Independent Newspapers of WNY.
Before Hardline starts, I decided to catch up on Dan’s latest columns.
He wrote a column on something I have been meaning to blog about but haven’t got around to…online comments on the Buffalo News’ site and their decision to change their policy on how people can post.
From Dan’s column “Not allowing anonymous online comments is really a no-brainer…”
If you haven’t done so recently, take a look around the World Wide Web sometime soon and just glance at the comment sections of local news websites. What you see may surprise you but really shouldn’t shock you as the frequent use of profanity, the practice of peppering people with petty personal attacks and many other senseless, brutal and vicious comments are things that you wouldn’t even see on the bathroom wall of any tavern on Chippewa Street in Buffalo.
Some of these online forums have helped to display that certain people using the safety of their computer have no fear in displaying how rude and crude they really are, especially when it comes to racist and homophobic rants that Donn Esmonde of The Buffalo News so accurately described in a recent column as “offensive garbage.”
I am all for the freedom and openness of the intertubes, but I think organizations like the News need to draw the line on what people post unless they are willing to put their name behind it.
The thing I fault News for is not doing this right from the get go when they started allowing comments.
What I hope the News does now is start to allow comments on all of their online content.
It is interesting to see traditional media play catch up on the internet, but I think the news is starting to deliver better things online as a whole…video, audio, etc. as add ons to their print stories.
