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Closing comments

March 8, 2010
By

Recently the Gazette closed comments for the first time on this story. The process of moderating comments is a difficult one. There’s some precedence on what to do, but the industry is somewhat divided.

We’ve modeled our comment policy from slate.com, nytimes.com, and instruction from our lawyer. That said, it’s under a constant state of revision. Our guiding principle is to strive for intelligent, relevant discussion about our stories and their subject matter. Of course, this doesn’t always happen.

In the story with closed comments, the discussion became extremely difficult to moderate. While we’re happy to facilitate discussion about our articles and its subject matter, our website is not intended as a sounding board for strictly political debate unrelated to the article, which is what we started seeing on that story. With such a subject matter, the discussion can quickly get out of hand. Before we closed the comments, we were moderating the article constantly to keep inflammatory comments off the site. The discussion turned nasty, impolite and accusatory.

Since we want to keep our comment boards and the discussion therein relevant, interesting and free from especially incendiary arguments, we felt it necessary to close the comments on this story.

Like I said, the process for closing comments is constantly evolving as we face new situations. We’re always trying to act in a way that balances open discussions with appropriate ones. If there are any comments about our policy, feel free to post them, write a letter or email Editor-in-Chief Ryan Hendrick.

Follow me on Twitter @StuartAtGazette

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Stuart A. Thompson

Stuart is the Editor-in-Chief for Volume 104 of the Gazette. He can be reached at stuart@westerngazette.ca. He was the news and web editor for Volume 103. He graduated with an honours BA in media, information and technoculture in 2010 and holds a certificate in writing and a diploma in journalism. Stuart can also be found on Twitter at www.twitter.com/StuartAtGazette.

1 Comment

  • Vote -1 Vote +1Greg Fowler     says:

    The fact that you had to close comments appears to be a negative reflection upon the commenters and not you. As for the story, I’d be interested to know if any of the people who received threats filed a complaint with Facebook and the police and, if so, what action resulted?

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