The Halifax Chronicle Herald signalled today it’s going to beef up its commenting system to improve the level of discourse on its site. Good to hear. Much of what passes for comment on news websites continues to be the lowest possible level of name-calling and uninformed bravado.

The Herald’s director of news content Dan Leger states:

“So we’re working on ways to end abuse, partly through registration and software to encourage use of real names and identify abuse. It won’t be perfect, but perhaps we can temper the over-the-top attacks.”

The issue of weak commenting systems was highlighted nationally last Wednesday when Halifax weekly The Coast said it would surrender the IP addresses of commenters following a Nova Scotia Supreme Court order. It’s the first time a news site has done that in Canada. Two senior fire officials at the Halifax Regional Municipality had sought to unmask the identities of these commenters, alleging they defamed them by painting their behaviour as racist and incompetent.

The move resulted in many people online and on local radio imploring news organizations to adopt a policy requiring real names for commenters as a means of raising the quality of online conversation.

They wanted to hear from someone like Howard Owens, who argues a real names policy is practical and enforceable at his New York State news site The Batavian.

I check public databases for names that match in the zip code provided. If no match, the user is asked to provide either by fax, e-mail or in person a copy of a picture ID.

Owens, himself, calls his policy “a ‘best effort’ practice,” siding with the news executives Richard Pérez-Peña cited in his New York Times article last week who “say that merely making the demand for a name and an e-mail address would weed out much of the most offensive commentary.” He may be right.

But while this may work at smaller news organizations, it is likely to be unworkable at sites that get tens or hundreds of new registrations a day. Pérez-Peña says as much in the Times story, which details the growing unease of news organizations with anonymous comments.

Real names strikes me as an offline solution to an online problem.

I argued in an interview on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet Nova Scotia last week that the big problem with the comments areas on most news stories is they seem to be abandoned by the news site itself. The result is the so-called “broken windows” problem — it becomes a wasteland vacated by moderates who have been long-since shouted down by blow-hards.

Author/blogger Scott Rosenberg states: ”Show me a newspaper website without a comments host or moderation plan and I’ll show you a nasty flamepit that no unenforceable ‘use your real name’ policy can save.”

I’m much more intrigued by Gawker’s approach. It implemented a more robust software system last year that gave its staff and community a way to promote the “funniest, thoughtful, intelligent, well-argued” comments. It divided its community into two tiers:

• a small community of “starred” commenters “who have proven themselves to be engaged, intelligent, humorous, fair-minded, thoughtful, rational.” These people can promote “well-written, thought out, intelligent and/or otherwise notable comment” below stories.
• The rest, whose comments will be obscured behind a “Show all comments” link

A key aspect is that the discussion is guided by an engaged community with an interest in creating a place people want to be. In addition, the community is fluid, with new commenters rising to become stars, and people who abuse their star power falling to become relative nobodies.

Gawker Media CTO Tom Plunkett suggested in this graph last week, that the site recovered — and thrived —  from an initial drop in comments that resulted from stripping people’s status based on the number of followers they had — and making many comments more difficult to view. He concludes: “purging commenter accounts is not a solution for the out-of-control commenter community. Nor is a large moderation staff.”

Will this completely stop defamatory comments? Probably not. Editor moderation is likely the only way to do that. But it’s a bottom-up — not top-down— prescription that seems a better fit with the medium.

As Dan Gillmor suggests, a better name would probably be Living Topics. The service, which is an amazing technological feat, groups news stories and deconstructs them for better online viewing. Google says the automated initiative, which it launched in co-operation with the New York Times and the Washington Post, does three things:

• Puts the entire coverage of a story under a single URL
• Chunks up the story elements by theme and form
• Customizes the reading experience so each person sees story developments new to them
  

The main benefit appears to be that it automatically generates context for stories by creating bite-sized content summaries and aggressively linking between them. For example, users can sort the story content by subtopics, major characters, quotes, external links, images, graphics, video, audio, etc. The size of the story summary also indicates its importance and newness, according to this Google video.

The Living Stories site isn’t optimized for my iPhone in any way. No doubt that’s coming; this sorting and grouping feature would seem tailor-made for mobile users.

Each topic starts with a dynamic topic summary and timeline. But the service doesn’t just reformat existing content. At the story level, there are some subtle differences from the versions that appear on the news outlet’s website. Take the War in Afghanistan Living Story and a story that’s part of it (Afghan Says Army Will Need Help Until 2024) , which is also on the Times’ website. In the Living Stories version …

• a link to Hamid Karzai, for example, goes not to a detailed bio like the one on the Times site, but to a pop-up snippet description
• there’s a link (“pledged to begin withdrawing American troops”) to a related story that isn’t made on the Times site
• an interactive map, which is not in the Times story, shows the location of the capital, Kabul.

The service has the potential to improve the online reading experience in a number of ways:

• by narrowing the inverted pyramid, so stories are less broad at the top — and more to the point — because the context surrounds it
• by including more summaries, which usability advocate Jakob Nielsen says are crucial for online reading
• by more aggressively linking content than human editors can — thereby improving the user experience on small screens

Still, there seem to be limitations. The importance of topic pages would seem to be diminishing as people increasingly consume content at the story level via Twitter and Facebook links. And I can think of many stories that won’t fit easily under topic designations.

But it’s a worthy innovation. I’m waiting for the mobile version.

Shakeups such as this don’t happen often — especially when they are related to publication of a single story. (That said, the T-J, under editor Shawna Richer, made a number of questionable moves in recent months.)

The New Brunswick news outlet, controlled by Irving-owned Brunswick News, announced this morning “there was no credible support” for the paper’s July 8, 2009 report that Prime Minister Stephen Harper “slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call ‘the host’ into his jacket pocket,” during a funeral mass for former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc. That’s bad enough. But the paper went on to apologize to the bylined reporters on the story for adding “inaccurate” statements “in the editing process” without their knowledge. Wow.

Still, I’m waiting to see what the paper does with the original story in its archives.

The July 8 story has no note either on the T-J’s site or in the NewsScan archive database that I referenced early on July 29. No mention of the correction or the apology. And no hypertext link between the two. Granted, it’s been only 18 hours since the T-J issued the statement and a notation could still be coming in a data dump. However, the paper should have made any change in conjunction with its public statement.

How should news media deal generally with stories they have determined to be substantially wrong?

Reuters released its style guide, called the Handbook of Journalism, on July 9, 2009. It outlines its internal filing procedures when “the story is fundamentally flawed” and notes that “this will alert our online colleagues to pull each version of the story from websites and to contact online customers to ask them to remove it.”

But simply removing all online evidence of an egregious error may not be the best practice. How can the audience be convinced an apology is comprehensive if the source document no longer exists? How can future researchers learn of errors in published stories? Would it not represent a step backward from the days when microfilm gave us the full published record, warts and all?

The New York Times sets a higher standard on these matters. The Times website still hosts the full stories published by Jayson Blair, the reporter the Times revealed in 2003 as having committed “frequent acts of journalistic fraud.” In addition, it annotates each page of his stories with known inaccuracies. For example, this 2002 story on the investigation into the Washington-area sniper contains a long list of corrections.

Many news organizations still lag in fully linking corrections and apologies to the originally published items. Many more succumb to the temptation to simply wipe clean the source of the embarrassment. I hope this won’t be the case here. There is an opportunity for the T-J to turn a major embarrassment into a minor source of pride.

Source: Google News

Give Associated Press President Tom Curley credit for grabbing people’s attention.

A New York Times story today quotes him stating that online references to AP stories containing as little as a headline and a link require a licensing agreement.

The interview follows AP’s announcement Thursday that it will begin a two-pronged approach to tracking sites that re-use AP content. The first initiative will be to include new metadata in news stories to identify key attributes of the story such as the author, the placeline and usage rights attached to it. The second will be to maintain a registry of stories and use software to track the content across the Internet. The goal is “to be paid for any use.”

Calling the registry a “declaration of war,” Erik Sherman calls the move “so stupid, so clearly self-damaging that you have to wonder whether someone inside the corporation is trying to torpedo it.”

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg chimes in, calling the effort “foolish and self-defeating.”

Most observers have focused on Curley’s comment concerning licensing for short chunks of text. But, in the Times article, Curley was coy as to how AP would go about enforcing its claims, adding, “We’re not picking the legal remedy today … Let’s define the scope of the problem.”

The prospect of suing people en masse for refusing to send money is indeed crazy. Curley’s claim would seem to ignore provisions of fair use in the American copyright act, not to mention the nature of the Internet. His intimation of enforcement would suggest he hasn’t learned much from the American recording industry’s efforts.

A story by the Nieman Lab’s Zachary M. Seward states that the New York Times’ top lawyer himself doubts aggregation is a copyright issue. Even if it is, as Google deftly pointed out to testy European publishers last week these companies can easily remove themselves from most aggregators’ reaches. Rosenberg argues in an excellent post that the real danger is the issue will end up in court where a judicial ruling could narrow the definition of American fair use provisions in its copyright act.

Too bad AP botched its PR on this.

There is actually much to admire in AP’s efforts. It’s the first major news organization to make a serious effort at tracking the use of its stories on the Internet. AP says it is using copyright-protection software made by Attributor Inc., which offers a Google Analytics-type interface for “finding copies of your content in near real-time.”

The company states, interestingly, that 30-40% of the excerpts it tracks fail to contain a referring link. That in itself indicates value in tracking egregious copyright violations and raising public awareness.

Update: Comment from AP on all the coverage