The “cone of silence” has lifted: We’d love to hear your feedback on all our stories, and publish some of it under a retooled comments process.
After a two-week “time-out” on publishing reader comments, we have turned the switch back on. With your help, we spent the time debating how best to continue including our readers’ insightful, fun, passionate comments (the best in the business) without resuming publishing the sewer that our comments section had become over the past six months. We missed you! So we’ve come up with the following changes in order to give it our best shot:
• If you’re new to our commenting ranks, please register with a real name (under “user name”) and email address before posting comments. You can comment anonymously. If you already had an account in good standing, you’re ready to go. If you’d like to change your screen name, please do it using your existing account — don’t register for a new one. (Got questions? Find answers here.)
• Please confirm that you’ve read our rules before posting comments.
• We’re keeping the same rules we had before but a) enforcing them more strictly; and b) publishing far fewer comments, even if they meet the rules. (More on that below.)
• Comments with factual allegations — what you heard in a bar, what nefarious deeds people are up to in local agencies — will be forwarded to reporters for possible use in stories, not published in the comments section. Better yet, send such information directly to reporters. An “E‑mail the author” button appears at the top of every story.
• Comments now have a word limit.
• We will continue to pre-screen all comments before publishing them. But less often. Our New Haven reporting and editing staff will no longer screen comments night and day. We just don’t have the dough for a full-time vetting team. Joshua Mamis and Gwyneth K. Shaw have generously volunteered to screen and publish comments six times each weekday (not on weekends), starting before the workday starts and ending in early evening. Josh was the longtime editor and publisher of the New Haven Advocate. Gwyneth, who used to cover Congress for the Baltimore Sun, is the Independent’s nanotechnology reporter. In the following piece, they explain their approach to their new task:
After reviewing our policy on commenting, we stand by our Rules of the Road. But we are changing how we enforce the rules. In a phrase, we have decided that less is more.
While in the past we have tried our best to be as inclusive as possible, to post any comment that didn’t specifically violate the rules, we will now be working under a much different standard. We will be posting comments that help to illuminate the story; that provide history and context and perspective that will guide New Haven Independent readers to a more thorough understanding of what is going on. We will be culling comments that not only violate the rules but that violate the spirit of the rules; that denigrate personalities; that are attempting to use the Independent to spar with those who disagree with them, or to try to settle scores.
New Haven is a geographically small city, and we think that’s one of our biggest advantages. We live and work and recreate with 130,000 or so familiar faces. We are, at heart, idealists, and we will be working to create an environment in which our readers can discuss our stories and disagree with each other with civility and respect.
We have come to understand that the comments section is no Hyde Park, no open forum for free-speech spouting. Our comment stream will be curated by experienced editors. Some comments – we expect far fewer than previously – will be posted; some will be forwarded to our writers to consider the input for follow-up reporting; some will be trashed for violating the rules; and some will be regretfully deleted with second guessing about whether we have made the right decision.
Because we freely admit that deciding which comment to publish and which comment to zap is a judgment call (much like the judgment call editors make when assigning or working on a story). We’re pretty sure we’ll miss a few in the months ahead. Nobody’s perfect.
And we apologize in advance that we won’t have the time or resources to provide you with individual responses as to our thinking, or to debate the outcome. Our decisions will be final. However, if your comment isn’t published, feel free to re-read our rules and try again. Remember that the New Haven Independent is part of a not-for-profit project with a small staff and a (very) limited budget. (Shameless plug: Please think about supporting our efforts.)
We can promise you this: We have no interest in filtering comments that take us to task or that disagree with any one particular point of view. Though we acknowledge that some of you may find that hard to believe, we do think that through this process our comments will reflect a huge diversity of ideas and perspectives that is impossible to achieve with our small news gathering operation. And for that, we thank you.
And so, enough about us. We’re once again eager to hear from you.
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