The Ohio Beacon Journal, like the Cincinnati Enquirer & other sites that allow commenting is wrestling with ways to handle online comments. The OBJ, unlike the local Fishwarp (to my knowledge) tried to get to know their audience. The title to their article was Commenters on newspaper websites may be a lonely bunch. This wasn'r exactly found through scientific research so much as it was a comment by a commenter who happens to be ill of health & primarily bed ridden. I think he might be biased. However Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron last year surveyed Plain Dealer online commenters as part of the Ohio Civility Project. They found a majority of frequent commenters are single males over 45 making more than $50K.
They found a small percentage of readers even read the comments. That small percentage is over 2M a day. While not in BIC's league, it's a decent size audience. From reading comments at the Fishwarp, it's clear that many commenters don't read the articles past the sensationalistic headlines, but that wasn't discussed. Maybe they naively believe they do read their professionally written articles. They also point out that, like the Fishwarp, their staffs don't even read the comments, let alone participate. So, why the fuck do they carry on about "civility"?
The article states they have 617 banned words including 61 variants of FUCK. I would like to see that list.
It was nice these guys reached out to their readers but they still don't get it. They are still arrogant & insulting to their readers. They still don't get that incendiary headlines & articles will result in incendiary comments.
Blogging Isn't Cool has no intention of censoring posts.
and as for the guy who just left a message on my answering machine telling me he wants his fucking sander back? sorry, wrong fucking number.
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