Beginning today, The Sun Chronicle (in Attleboro, MA) is abolishing anonymous comments the only foolproof way they know how: By attaching usernames to credit transactions.

The paper is charging commenters a one-time fee of 99 cents to be paid by credit card to that each user’s comments and community name will be tied to the name on the paying card (which also is tied to their real address and phone number).

This isn’t all that new, of course. It is a similar approach as what Honolulu news start-up Civil Beat does for their site’s discussion membership level, which charges 99 cents a month via Paypal to leave comments on the site. When Jay Rosen was here visiting us at TBD a few weeks back, he sang the praises of this system for keeping trolls out of their (notably civil) online discussions.

I, as you might gather from past posts, do not agree with the entire premise of this plan for several reasons.

First and foremost, this move can and will eliminate certain segments of the paper’s readership from ever being able to post comments. Aside from the trolls they want to eliminate, the paper can also count out those who do not have a credit card. This can include young people, those with credit problems or otherwise bad finances, those who don’t trust online financial systems – and numerous other possibilities I’m sure aren’t coming to mind right away.

And anonymity, while it can breed ugliness in online comments, has its virtues as well. The ability to speak out without identification is a necessary part of sometimes difficult discussions (like the kind we have on news sites).

Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation expounded eloquently on this point in a different case (involving an embarrassing edict and retraction by the gaming company Blizzard):

Anonymous speech has always been an integral part of free speech because it enables individuals to speak up and speak out when they otherwise may find reason to hide or self-censor. Behind the veil of anonymity, individuals are more free to surface honest observations, unheard complaints, unpopular opinions…

Without anonymity, the comments may end up being quite banal. The next time the Sun Chronicle wants to crowdsource a story (if they do that sort of thing), they can rule out getting anyone to talk openly about their medical conditions, their families, if they witnessed a crime, if they’re having money problems – anything they wouldn’t want the whole community to know.

And finally, is this sort of step really necessary to control comments anyway? As I’ve said before, it is possible to create a robust online community by simply being more engaged as a staff. Better community via interaction is what we aim to do where I work.

Going back to the Civil Beat model, it should be noted the site’s discussions have staff hosts who are an active and visible presence in their threads. How much of Civil Beats, er, civility, is actually better attributed to staff interaction as opposed to their identified commenters?

Of course, that level of interaction requires staff hours most news orgs can’t or won’t spare. There are other, less time-intensive methods that are built into comment systems that other sites have managed to use to control trolls.

As the Editors Weblog noted:

…many prominent publications such as The Globe and Mail and NYT are able to maintain flourishing online communities by instituting a combination of user-rankings (inappropriate comments are quickly down-voted while insightful ones get promoted to the top of the page) and paid moderators.

It seems like a lot of overkill to ban anonymous comments in this fashion when there are other options available that can yield similar results – and yet still allow open discussion.

First up is the absolutely appalling handling of a new business model by the Tallahassee Democrat. The paper is going to start charging for news online – which the publisher finally gets around to saying on the second page after a long-winded, self-congratulatory monologue.

The column says:

It no longer seems fair to have only half of our readers pay for content while the other half reads for free online. This is about changing how we do business, not simply putting up a paywall on digital content.

Unless the TD happens to charge quite a bit for their print edition, the print subscribers aren’t paying for that journalism any more than the digital readers. They’re merely paying to have it delivered to their homes on expensive paper. That payment isn’t covering the cost of the reporting and editing. More on that later.

Aside: The same column that says online readers aren’t paying for content is unnecessarily paginated into three pages in order to rack up page views and generate online ad revenue. Talk about adding insult to injury.

But at least the paper’s publisher and editor were only trying to pull a fast one over on digital readers. A columnist at the paper upped the ante, going so far as to equate online readers with shoplifters.

He also seems to espouse the belief that the paper’s journalists are apparently above criticism, especially from the criminals who consume their news online. I won’t bother excerpting, as the entire column is essentially about this point.

Both pieces not only reflect complete distaste for online readers, they also seem to be a bit behind the times. The production of journalism is paid for by advertising revenue, which has been largely generated by printed ads in the past (hence why these guys want to keep readers there).

I suppose the Democrat must have missed the news that online advertising will soon be surpassing print. Maybe they’d be better off finding new ways to market themselves to online readers to keep more eyeballs on their site.

That brings us to the other newspaper industry wishful thought of the week: The classic “we’re the only trusted source for news” mantra.

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt told the Tri-City Herald a bedtime story about how “real” journalists are far more trustworthy than bloggers.

It is often impossible to know if anyone has verified the material that’s on the internet or whether anyone is held responsible for rumors, misinformation or outright libel.

That uncertainty is working in newspapers’ favor. People are turning to newspaper websites as a trusted source.

I’m not sure where Pruitt got his facts, which the paper reiterated without any backing up, because they’re quite flawed. I guess those online types aren’t the only ones who don’t back up what they hear from biased sources with real reporting. (Zing)

Thankfully, the Herald’s coverage area has blogger Matt McGee to set the record straight – with links to back up his claims. As my boss, Steve Buttry, asks in his post on this back-and-forth, “Which is the stronger example of journalism?”

This standoffish game has to stop if newspapers want to stick around. As these guys are out there turning away online readers and dismissing potential partners, news startups like TBD are out there ready to pick them up. And we aren’t alone.

Scoff if you want, but readers do, in fact, trust bloggers and news via social media more than you think. As the online medium continues to grow – and today’s young people continue to grow as news consumers – this New Frontier will become News as We Know It. Don’t newspapers want to be a part of that?

The same people we’ve had to file FOIA requests about for decades want to help us “save” our industry. Isn’t that nice of them? It isn’t like they don’t have other things to worry about.

Ideas on the table include waiving antitrust statutes to allow newspapers to all charge for online content at once, taxing iPads and other e-readers, establishing a government fund to pay young journalists to do…something and allowing newspapers to charge aggregators for linking to their content.

If these are the solutions proposed, it’s pretty easy to see what the problem REALLY is. Journalism isn’t what they’re trying to save here – it’s newspapers. And not just any newspapers – the government is trying to prop up a defiantly anti-evolutionary business model supported by big corporations who can actually afford to save themselves if they’d be willing to make a little less profit.

These solutions would do far more harm than good for journalism. They seek to punish those innovative individuals and news organizations that are trying – and sometimes failing – to do business a new way in order to survive. But at least they’re trying.

Allowing big, established publications to break all the rules would push the online startups and hardworking bloggers out of business – and for what? To make sure the Gannetts of the world are still able to pay out big dividends to shareholders? To create throwaway jobs for young journalists who can and should be paid by the news organizations that currently make money off their free work?

More importantly, this kind of move seeks to take choice away from the American people. Newspaper readership isn’t down because the Internet “steals” their product – it’s because readers have chosen to get news elsewhere. News consumers want to read news online, on Twitter, on mobile devices and iPads. Some would just rather hear about what’s going on from a favorite blogger or a friend on Facebook than a 600-word news article. Forcing people to pay for news from newspapers doesn’t make information more accessible – and THAT should be the goal of any government intervention.

Journalism is doing fine – it’s only old media that needs a lifeline. The government can study all they want – and, by all means, they can go ahead and start offering bribes – er, subsidies and new statutes – to aid news organizations. But anyone who takes this money has no business calling themselves journalists anymore. “Ministers of Information” may be more appropriate.

As my future colleague Jeff Sonderman wrote,  it really fits with the mission of what we’re trying to do here.

News at the start of the reporting process is “to be determined” – though in the traditional model, many readers don’t get to see it or be a part of it at that point. You get it later, as a finished product in print, online or on-air. If you’re lucky, we’ll let you comment on it or write a letter to the editor when its done.

I truly believe needs to be alive to be relevant. Our goal is to get news out there fast, yes, but we also need to make that news evolve in time with the release of information, the ebb and flow of public opinion and the constant input of those affected by it.

There can and will be several avenues for the public to share in cultivating and developing the news at TBD – and I hope the people of metro DC will be as excited to be a part of it as I am. So far, the reaction seems positive. What do you think?

Brady outlines the site’s coverage plan, which is, essentially, a bit of the umbrella (regional news readers care about) and the microscope (community-level news). He also talked a bit about what we on the community engagement team will be doing in terms of aggregation, curation and reaching out.

You can guess that I think the plans sound awesome since I accepted a job there and all, but I’m curious to see what you think. Does this sound like a site you’d want to read?

I’m proud to say that as of today, I’m going to be a part of this exciting and altogether new approach to news. I recently accepted a job to be the site’s social media producer, working with the likes of Jim Brady, Steve Buttry and the site’s rapidly-growing community engagement staff.

So long Camp Washington Chili, hello Ben’s Chili Bowl.

Did I mention I was excited? I also meant terrified.

I’ve had a great ride in my three years at Cincinnati.Com. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really great journalists and brilliant innovators. I lead a comfortable existence here, with my husband working right across the office and lots of friends living close by.

I’m terrified/excited to throw away all I know for a whole new life in a new city and a company with a new way of doing business. I think I’m running out of chances to take chances – and this one just seemed like the best fit possible.

I’m thrilled for the opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in the journalism industry – and hopefully do a little bit of teaching myself.

We’ll be out to redefine what it really means to connect with a news audience – and there’s no way we’ll be doing this alone. I encourage my readers and friends in Cincinnati to offer their ideas and advice (and maybe a pint or two?) as I prepare move ahead to the new job. If any of you are from the DC area, please introduce yourselves via social media or in the comments below. I’m sure I’ll need all the tips and ideas you can give me.

It is only with the cooperation and input from local readers that this new project will be able to thrive. I hope you’ll all be along for the ride.

In your daily news meetings, listen for how many times an assignment editor or reporter says, “….we’ll have that for tomorrow.” If this is in reference to anything but an enterprise story from the budget, that’s a bad sign. If it is in regard to any event happening that same day, it’s a very bad sign.

I’ve been on the online side of newspapers for my entire professional career and I’ve seen a lot of culture shifts, but the online deadline of now seems to be the biggest gap to cross. It seems that many reporters and editors are no longer driven by competition to be first with the news. Many don’t think there even IS competition.

With so many newspapers closing up shop in the last five years, many metro newspapers (like the Enquirer) are the only dailies left standing in their cities. In smaller areas, newspapers have enjoyed lifetimes of market domination. With the old school competition gone, some news people have simply taken to early in-office retirement.

Where reporters once raced to get exclusive stories into the next edition before the competing afternoon paper could jump aboard, now they don’t see a good reason to rush when the print deadline is 5 p.m. They ask, “Who are we trying to scoop, anyway?”

As online editor I can only say, “Everybody.”

Just because there’s no other printed daily newspaper in town doesn’t mean there isn’t competition. The Cincinnati Post may be dead and gone, but it doesn’t mean we’re the knight left standing. My paper still has to contend with several TV station websites, a “weekly” business journal reporting daily news online and a robust blogosphere that can (and often do) beat us to the punch.

Putting aside the obvious time implications of true breaking news, let’s look at the day-to-day budget – the press conferences, scheduled events and government meetings. How long after such an event has taken place does it take for your publication to have some sort of news online?

If it is more than an hour before this gets online, you’ve already lost to the competition. If it is leisurely filed at 5 p.m. for the next day’s paper, well, you should probably just pack up your website and head home.

The fact is, it isn’t even just about being first, it is about proving your value in a 24-hour news marketplace.

Readers expect information as soon as something happens. Any gap in time between an event happening and when they read about it from the “paper of record” is time spent looking elsewhere, on Google, Twitter, blogs, TV sites, etc. to find out what’s going on. They aren’t expecting a Pulitizer winner in 20 minutes, just the basics.

How relevant is that write-up of a  late night school board meeting in the day-after-tomorrow’s paper? If we as an industry still exist for the purpose of informing the public, we should re-evaluate our relevance if we can’t even get a basic overview of a government meeting to them within a half hour of its conclusion. For breaking news, the deadline of NOW is even more important.

We as journalists want readers to choose us and, preferably, pay for us – but we need to give them a reason to want it in the first place.

Fact is, many website visitors, as much as they may complain about comments, love to read them.  Cincinnati.Com gets a lot of traffic just to the comment sections associated with stories. In January alone, Cincinnati.Com got more than 700,000 page views to just the comments on stories (not counting blogs, forums, etc.). When we choose to take comments off of certain stories, I can see the effect it has on page views in our analytics analysis.

So what? Maybe we want to take the high road, page views be damned, right?

Dream on.

This comment backlash has revealed another “have your cake and eat it too” problem for the news industry. We want the page views, but don’t feel comfortable with the sort of content that tends to bring them in.

I speak from experience when I say that nothing is more likely to make a newsroom editors exude multiple personalities quite like the almighty page view. One minute they’re railing on about how we’re above using non-news linkbait online. The next, they’re in a froth over a party girl photo gallery with hundreds of thousands of page views, asking for more of the same. When your job depends on it, it can be rough to keep up.

Have I posted or promoted a story because I knew it would get comments (and thus, page views)? Absolutely. It happens on every size of news site and blog. We attempt to balance our tastes and news judgment with the harsh and unpleasant realities of online revenue every single day.

I really doubt news execs are really willing to give up the multiple millions of page views associated with comments on stories every year. Maybe, just maybe, they’d instead be willing to invest a bit of money and personnel in making those comments a bit better via good moderation.

Maybe I’m the one who’s dreaming?

I’m not at all surprised she’d take this stance – most reporters seem to feel this way because (I theorize, anyway), they have to put their names on everything they write and wish everyone who attacked their work had to do the same. It’s understandable, but in a lot of ways also very hypocritical.

Journalists want whistle-blowers to rat out government, friends and bosses and live for meaty quotes sharing unpopular or even dangerous points of view. We’ll also usually be happy to let you express those opinions anonymously — just so long as we get to put our bylines on them. We want to serve as a community hub and “voice of the people”, but only want to allow certain opinions to be heard.

The commenters on the story note readers appreciate knowing who is saying what and many acknowledge that it probably would improve the tenor of comments – but they also know it will cut back on dialogue at large (and not always the bad kind). Here’s a comment from a user named RVA123:

There are some risks with requiring names on Cleve.com forums: Though you may be able to ultimately verify authenticity, creating and posting false names will still be too easy for motivated trolls. It probably reduces participation – - which can be perceived as a good thing if it reduces irresponsible posts written solely to drive a negative reaction, and a bad thing if it kills your conversations (and a potential revenue stream for the site) altogether.

Several other commenters note they’d be less likely to share opinions under their real names because they don’t want their bosses and neighbors to know their political leanings, what they watch on TV, where they live or what they REALLY think of their jobs. It isn’t that they have something to hide or have such outrageous opinions they’d never want their names attached – they just want the modicum of privacy they feel the Internet has provided in the last decade or so.

So is less conversation really what we want? Is it better if we have fewer opinions so long as they’re all bylined and well thought-out? From the reactions I hear in my own newsroom every day, I’d say it’s an overwhelming opinion that yes, that’s exactly what we want.

I don’t like being in the position of defending the sort of toxic, anonymous comments that currently permeate news sites, but I believe we as an industry are clinging to an outdated model of what it means to allow the community to have its say. We think that by printing a handful of letters to the editor we are responsibly letting readers have a say because they put their names on those letters. Never mind that those letters usually don’t represent an entire generation of readers – one that tends to do most opinion-sharing online using social media – and are overwhelmingly submitted by white writers.

Aside from any demographic arguments that could be made (and I’d love more and better data if anyone has it), I know how I feel about what I read. My local letters to the editor regularly seem to me to be written by people who aren’t my age and don’t have much in common with my way of life, so I don’t consult them to find out real community reaction on the issues I care about and neither do most of my contemporaries. I turn to blogs, Twitter, Facebook and, yes, the comments on the stories themselves, to see what people have to say. There are a lot more of them – and they’re often far more familiar to me.

If news sites were to eliminate anonymous comments, we should consider what kind of reader would be left out in the cold. Not every anonymous commenter is a racist stalker with an axe to grind – so maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.

As I’ve written here before, it is part of my job to navigate the waters of Cincinnati.Com’s article and blog comments to determine what should stay and what gets removed as per our terms of service. Back in 2008, I helped set up the site’s comment system, wrote our discussion guidelines and laid the groundwork for how comments would be moderated. The process has evolved and grown to keep up with what we’ve learned from interacting with and watching our community members – and it’s given me a unique perspective on anonymity and commenting.

Of all the comments I’ve removed and all the users I’ve had to block from our sites, I’ve learned a few things that have led me to believe that anonymity doesn’t really matter at all. Here’s why:

1. Most users who have had comments removed do not believe their comment was racist/homophobic/libelous/spam – and they would see no problem posting that comment again (and again) under their real names.

2. Most users who have comments removed or are kicked off the site have no problem contacting staff by phone or email to complain, thus dropping their anonymity in most cases. Aside: The tops is when they use a work email address to defend their statements about how “X race is too lazy to work”. Hilarity.

3. Banned or unverified users will find a way to post what they want to post. Whether it is creating a fake Facebook/OpenID identity, a new IP address, dozens of Hotmail addresses, cleaned cookies – they’ll do it to get around a login system. There are about five users I have kicked off our site dozens of times – and there’s seemingly nothing I can do to get them to go away permanently. One even went so far as to tell me, “Do what you want. I have nothing but time on my hands – and you don’t.”

On the flip side, I am a longtime member of a message board that has very few of these problems. The site’s thousands of users know and respect one another for the most part, conversations stay on-topic and free of hate speech and I rarely see users or comments removed. What’s their secret? Constant moderator interaction.

A moderator is always online -and there is an indication of this that shows up on the forum. The moderator regularly participates in discussion, responds to questions and, most importantly, will give warnings publicly when they are needed. It’s not uncommon to see a gentle “Hey guys let’s try to get this back on topic” or “I had to remove a few posts that got pretty heated, try to keep it civil, folks”. Sometimes the moderators don’t even have to do this. Other members will band together to fight off a troll – or defend a friend they feel was wronged. This sense of community derives from the understanding that there’s safety and support supplied by that moderator presence.

Contrast this with the moderator involvement on most news sites. Most users don’t even know a staffer was reading their comments until they are removed. Chances are most users don’t know a site’s moderators until they get a warning. We all know what the solution is, but our paper – and most other sites like ours – is not able to put that amount of manpower into moderation. Community interaction is not a top-level priority to most news outlets – and that’s the real problem.

We as an industry like to collectively wring our hands about the toxicity of online comment boards, but if we really want to improve the quality of on-site discussion we need to be willing to get involved in our sites in a hands-on manner. No amount of word filters, comment-detecting robots and user-end moderation will replace the presence of a dutiful moderator (and that, unfortunately, requires money).