Monitoring comments on your website, Facebook page

Monica Nieporte, regional vice president and general manager of ACM Ohio and publisher of the Athens (Ohio) Messenger, emailed me this question earlier today (Friday, May 13), and I thought I would share.
She thought it would be a good blog topic.

Rick, Do we have any kind of policy on how “liberal” we are to be with the use of language on our Facebook pages- regarding reader comments?

Clearly, we monitor for obscenity, libelous comments, etc. However, some media are more liberal than others with allowing people to use more “mild” profanity (I guess using the FCC as a guide).

Personally, I’d rather not have it but I also don’t like it on my tv sitcoms either… just me.

What is prompting this question is a few minutes ago we got the latest one… someone being referred to as a POS….….. using the text abbreviation but we all know what it is.

This would be a great topic for your blog!

Monica, you are right — this is a great topic for this blog.

My response to Monica was I recommended she delete the comment made by the reader on the newspaper's Facebook page, and follow that up with a post from the publisher, editor or webmaster urging users of the page to keep their comments clean and civil, and that any comments newspaper management or readers deemed offensive would be deleted and that user could be blocked.

Monitoring comments on stories and links posted on our websites and Facebook and social media pages have long been a sense of frustration and angst for reporters, editors and publishers.

One side of the argument is that comments on stories and coverage drive traffic and encourage interaction between the newspaper and readers, and between readers themselves, while the other side believes comments can skew the content and tone of a report or news coverage.

I see good points on both ends of the argument.

My rule of thumb is simple — considering the majority of our properties reside in small markets, I like to keep our comments and content as PG as possible.

Some might argue that Facebook comments can and should be a little more liberal, but again, those comments could be seen as a reflection of the newspaper.

Know that Rodney Blaukat and his online team are looking at other options on our commenting function of our websites, and this is a topic of discussion at the corporate office.

In closing, I always recommend to err on the side of caution and delete any comment you think could be offensive when it comes to bad language.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!