If the ongoing drama of the terrorist assaults in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania is by far the biggest news story of the Internet age, its also the most severe test yet of that set of interactive communities features which uniquely distinguish the online medium.
You can still start a lively discussion among journalists whether of the traditional or new media variety on whether chat rooms and discussion boards contribute to well-rounded coverage of the news or detract from it. Are they forums for public participation, offering users an unprecedented opportunity to exchange ideas on the most important issues of the day? Or do they too often encourage the spread of rumor and uninformed opinion, frequently expressed in terms that polarize rather than enrich?
After spending many hours over the past several days lurking in chats and reading discussion board posts and letters e-mailed to MSNBC.com, Id say that both sides of the argument are able to find support for their view in the publics online response to last weeks attacks. The sheer volume of the response is evidence that these interactive features have earned their place in an online news site, and editors are making better use of them.
At their best, user comments inspire and illuminate. Unfortunately, communities features also remain an outlet for some of the darkest aspects of human nature.
And in the case of last weeks terrorist attacks, they belie the notion that this tragedy has suddenly brought a politically and socially divided nation together. I am saddened here by even the division and difficulty the (people) in this room are having in uniting, wrote an MSNBC.com chatter with the screen name PryrWarrior on Thursday. We must stop this and help each other.
But first, more about that volume.
It was so large on MSNBC.coms discussion boards that most of the 44 topic boards listed on the site were disabled in order to better handle the load on boards most pertinent to the tragedy. The nine boards open for discussion were accessed more than 200,000 times in the six days following the attack, more than five times the normal rate, according to Danielle Bingham, MSNBC.coms communities producer and letters editor. The total included a new board, In Memoriam, created for those who wish to express condolences for those who perished in the Sept. 11 attack and post messages of support for their loved ones.
Statistics about MSNBC Chat are difficult to determine, since the huge hit of traffic in the immediate aftermath of the attacks essentially shut down chat for about 8 hours. Once service was reestablished, according to Chat Producer Will Femia, 54,600 unique users accessed the MSNBC Chat page on Sept. 11, compared with 4,000 the day before. As of this writing, the site is maintaining its NewsChat feature, where users discuss current events, on a 6 a.m. to midnight ET schedule, Monday through Friday. Special event and guest chats will resume next week.
There is certainly no place else where you can express your opinion so easily, noted Femia, who witnessed the World Trade Center attack from his apartment two blocks away and reported much of it live in the chat room before he was forced to evacuate. People need to vent. They need to participate.
Another indication: The site received 30,856 e-mail letters to the editor on the subject in the six days immediately following the attacks. That compares with an average of closer to 20,000 total such letters last month. Usually, Bingham updates the Letters to the Editor page with a selection of new reader comments once a day, but given the importance of the event and the unusual volume of mail in its wake, she immediately increased that to twice a day. I felt I needed to give as many people as possible a platform to say their piece.
Those selected letters apparently had a wide audience. More than 47,000 unique users accessed the letters page during the six days following the attacks compared with fewer than 98,000 during the entire month of August.
More user comments came into other MSNBC.com e-mail addresses. A special America on Alert mailbox established in the wake of the attack to collect reader experiences of the tragedy has had about 15,000 responses so far, for example. Editors periodically update a selection of those responses published on the site. Letters to the Editor
All media have so far distinguished themselves in the coverage of this event, commented Joan Connell, executive producer for opinions and communities. Television, for its immediacy; print for its depth; online journalism, for allowing people to come together and ponder the issues before us our security as a nation, our personal freedoms and our responsibilities as citizens.
Life has changed and will continue to change. Chat rooms and discussion boards were once considered frivolous online toys. Now they are proving to be legitimate tools of journalism an electronic public square for people to come together to think this through.
The main challenge to those responsible for community features is to keep them on topic and civil. Thats not much of a problem when editors are selecting letters for publication on the site. Choices are by definition subjective, but Bingham and Connell said they look for readers who provide their real name and home town, and whose letters are issue-oriented, lucid and free of expletives. There is no obligation for the letters page to reflect the preponderance of readers opinion, commented Connell. I dont think numbers tell the story. I think ideas and arguments tell the story.
Discussion boards and chat, by contrast, are features in which the user posts directly to the live site, without any pre-screening by an editor. (Messages do pass through an offensive language filter.) An online Code of Conduct for MSNBC Chat and Discussion Boards warns that violations may result in a user being barred and posts deleted.
Femia said two hosts are on duty at all times to monitor MSNBC.com chat rooms, and that they have definitely been more active in barring users for violations of the code since the terrorist attacks. Similarly, Bingham oversees a small team of monitors who delete offensive posts from discussion boards and who respond to user complaints about conduct violations.
The system is far from perfect, however. There is always a delay in finding and deleting offensive posts. As a result, its usually taken me only a few minutes spent in a chat or reading messages these past few days to find examples that clearly violate the codes ban on posts that advocate or encourage expressions of violence, bigotry, racism, hatred or profanity. Ive also seen evidence in posts and unpublished letters to the editor of a continuing trend in the wake of the 2000 U. S. presidential election to politicize even this national tragedy demonizing those who have a different perspective on an appropriate response, for example, as either cowards or barbarians.
In addition to the purely offensive, online chats and bulletin boards are also burdened by the inane. Ive used these features professionally for nearly a decade now, but Im still frustrated by the amount of time it can take to plow through the chaff in order to find the comments and observations of real substance that are also there. Before Id be willing to call these features clear journalistic successes, there will have to be a lot more work on software that allows editors and users alike to quickly sort and surface those posts that are most pertinent.
There is certainly no guarantee that MSNBC.coms communities features or those of any other site are representative of broader public opinion. But despite the acknowledged shortcomings, the sheer volume of the online outpouring also means that for those trying to better understand the depth and complexity of the public mood in the aftermath of Sept. 11, neither can it be dismissed as irrelevant.
