Archive for the comments Tag

When is an online comment defamatory?

Rob Minto looks at two recent cases that leave the field of libel online as confusing as ever. For several years, newspapers, bloggers and other online publishers have been waiting for a landmark case to clarify defamation online. The unanswered questions have been along the lines of: who’s responsible – the author or publisher (or even ISP)? What jurisdiction will
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Serene Branson: The Sun changes its story – but not the URL

It appears last week’s guidance from the PCC on correcting URLs as well as the contents of stories has not reached The Sun. Serene Branson’s on-air slurring was initially mocked by the tabloid with the headline “Grammy’s reporter goes gaga”. When it emerged that the presenter may have* suffered from a stroke the article was rewritten – but not the
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‘UGC’ and journalism: the Giffords shooting and Facebook page moderation

The Obama London blog has a post looking at the moderation of comments on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page (following the Giffords shooting) which raises a couple of key points for journalists dealing with user generated content. Editorially selected, not UGC The first point is that it can be easy to assume user generated content is an unadulterated reflection of one
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Why it pays to respond to your comments

This story was originally published at Poynter. Republished here for archiving purposes. Newspapers take a lot of flak when they or mis-attribute or fail to acknowledge the work of bloggers and members of the public in reporting a story, so it was refreshing to see my two local newspapers quickly respond to amend online reports following a number of corrective comments. But
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When the lack of comments damages your news brand

If you want to skip the background, go to the next subheading Last week the BBC Education website published a piece about a report into the use of technology by schoolchildren: “Tech addiction ‘harms learning’”: “Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned,” the intro led, before describing the results of the
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Do blogs make reporting restrictions pointless?

Big problem with reporting restrictions & blogs: there’s nothing to stop blogs repeating the information unless they know about the court order. But there’s no way to find out about the court orders.

Could moderators collect potential leads from comments?

Guardian community moderator Todd Nash* makes an interesting suggestion on his blog about the difficulties journalists face in wading through comments on their stories: “there is potential for news stories to come out of user activity on newspaper websites. Yet, as far as I know, it is not a particularly well-utlised area. Time is clearly an issue here. How many
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Arrested for someone else’s comments?

Kent police appear to have arrested a man in connection with comments made on alternative news service Indymedia – despite neither making the comments nor administering them.

Removing Nofollow on blog links and meta – and invisible comments

A couple months ago I installed a plugin on the blog that meant search engines would index links in comments: by default WordPress uses ‘nofollow‘ on comments to stop spammers abusing them to boost search engine rankings, but that prevents genuine commenters getting credit for their contributions. One problem: as one commenter pointed out, the blog as a whole was
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Are your comments invisible? How about your website?

If your news organisation uses javascript for its comments, or for any other part of the site, you may well be advised to start doing some testing. Malcolm Coles, the Editor of Which.co.uk, has been highlighting some of the problems with the technology for search engine optimisation and accessibility (the two are often closely related) on his blog.