Before we left for break, the Collegiate Times management and I took some time out for a lunch meeting with a few figures around campus. Present were representatives from undergraduate and graduate organizations, as well as administration and the Women’s Center. We all had a constructive conversation about what exactly should be appearing alongside the online version of the CT.
What’s the problem, you might ask? Well if you ever get a chance to glance at comments that readers put on our stories, you’d understand a bit more. We were trying to get to the bottom of the primary concern several people in our community have about our online commenting system: whether it is destructive or harmful to the climate of Tech’s campus.
To give you an idea of our readership, I’ll give you some numbers. Our Tuesday through Friday print circulation is currently 12,500 copies. Online, our traffic this semester has ranged from 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a week depending on the week. Our Web site gets traffic from all over the world, but 50 percent of traffic is from the state of Virginia. Further, 50 percent of the Virginia traffic is in Blacksburg.
In other words, 25 percent of the overall Web traffic comes from people in Blacksburg. Of those who read our online content, 55 percent are returning visitors. These numbers have shown a steady increase in past years. That being said, since only 25 percent of our online readership is actually part of our Blacksburg community — as opposed to alumni, parents, and others invested in Virginia Tech — one could debate if the online community is representative of Tech and the surrounding areas.
While it says right on our print version that we are serving the Blacksburg community, it is necessary to be reminded that the CT is part of a non-profit called Educational Media Company at Virginia Tech, which encompasses student media at Tech. We, of course, still try to work with the university, as there are countless individuals who work with us, in order to provide the community the very best newspaper possible.
However, when we cross the line into the online version of the CT, areas that are otherwise clear become fuzzy. When it comes to online commenting and anonymity, the CT staff has engaged in long debates with our advisers and others around the university as to whether our current system is, in fact, the best system. Currently, users are not required to register in order to comment on our stories. We intend to keep it that way.
While some would say that making people register would eliminate many of the hurtful, degrading, vulgar, racist and deconstructive comments that anonymous users submit, it wouldn’t be a perfect system. We also believe it would eliminate a number of constructive yet critical comments that students or other community members may not want their name attached to.
In order to meet somewhere in the middle, we have begun to turn the wheels as far as moving toward a community moderation format for our Web site. As it stands now, I, the public editor, am the sole moderator. Abiding by the candidates of deletion, I am responsible to delete comments from our Web site. I was hired in this position because my judgment was trusted, and our paper follows firm candidates of deletion so that there is a standard of what should be deleted and what is permissible.
It’s also important to send a message of freedom of speech and the availability of an open forum since we are a local newspaper. You, as a reader, don’t often get a chance to be so close to the content of a newspaper.
The paper is very local so we don’t want to take away the constructive comments of readers who are uncomfortable attaching their name to an opinion. Even if they were to have their name known by our staff, an individual might not want to trust us — a group of students — with his identity in connection to a critical comment.
It’s also necessary that we make it clear that my duty is to moderate after it appears on the Web site. Our staff does not edit comments, thus we are not liable for any of the content that you see on the boards. However, we do believe that as a service it is necessary to moderate the offensive comments that can sometimes be posted. So we sat down and created more specific guidelines as to what would be buried by moderation, and these are now posted above the comment form on the Web site.
Also, per CT policy, we do not allow staff to write comments on any material, be it their own or that of a colleague. We are not partaking in the discussion because it is an area that is reserved for the readers. While that rule hasn’t been made as clear in the past, we are certainly working on reestablishing that.
While we do not plan on making individuals register, we’re looking at improving the format of online commenting at CollegiateTimes.com. After we introduced the buried-by-moderation feature with the redesign this year (burying the degrading comments as opposed to permanently removing them from the page), we began to think of incrementally moving toward community moderation, and trying to bridge the gap between print and online content.
If you look at an article, you can now see the option to send a letter to the editor, in addition to leaving a comment. With this form, we hope to encourage more readers to send a letter to Debra, our opinions editor, as opposed to just leaving a comment. This will allow more readers to see the opinion in print as well as online, and it’s just as simple.
In addition we’re looking at possible options to create a community-moderating system similar to Reddit.com or Digg.com. What are your thoughts? Would you use these features? If not, what would be your ideal moderating system? Send us a letter to the editor, shoot us an e-mail, or come by our table on the Drillfield on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. to let us know what you think.
Any questions? I’m available at publiceditor@collegiatetimes.com.