The Patriot Ledger

Commenting is back with a vengeance

Posted on April 2, 2008 by kjohnson
Filed Under patriot ledger | Leave a Comment

You can again leave comments on stories, effective immediately, while we try out a new way to monitor them. In the first day we had 142 comments on 25 stories, and only pulled a few for reasons of taste.

We now have better tools for weeding out material that violates our terms of service, which prohibit vulgar, racist and sexist remarks and personal attacks. You’re of course welcome to use this blog to discuss general issues and our coverage, in print or online.

Your guide to our site

Posted on March 18, 2008 by kjohnson
Filed Under 1 | 1 Comment

We have some good news for those of you who hate our new site because they think it’s hard to use, and maybe for everyone else as well. No, we’re not going back to the old site. (The new one is actually going pretty well, thanks.) But we do have a daily index that will list all the new material. The plan is to have it up by 9 a.m. and to update it regularly during the day. And now we have a daily e-mail alert for anyone who would like to sign up. CLICK HERE to check it out. It’s the last story on the home page, “NEW TODAY: Ledger.com for (date).” You can’t miss it. Please let us know what you think. You can sign up or leave comments here or e-mail us at newsroom@ledger.com. To subscribe, type “subscribe” in the sunbkect line of the e-mail.

Ken Johnson
Online editor

More on comments

Posted on March 17, 2008 by kjohnson
Filed Under 1 | 2 Comments

    We’re still working on a way to bring story comments back without opening the floodgates to offensive posts. In the meantime, CLICK HERE for a better explanation of the challenge newspapers face in making the transition to online. And CLICK HERE if you want to know even more.

Ken Johnson
Online editor

Rome.com wasn’t built in a day

Posted on March 4, 2008 by kjohnson
Filed Under 1 | Leave a Comment

I want to apologize for getting behind, and to promise that it will happen again. The first rule of blogging is to post often, but you’d never know it by me. In my defense, I have replied to some of you individually and will do that whenever possible.

bps0cxk wrote from Australia to say he doesn’t like the new format and to ask why old stories appear day after day. kmnorton liked the format better, but agreed. We try to keep that from happening. In general, stories run in the order they are posted, unless we rank them, which anchors them in a position until we unrank them, which is a pain. The featured stories on the main pages stay up until we change them, and sometimes we forget. We want to keep the site looking as fresh as possible. Even if it doesn’t always look that way, there’s a ton of fresh material on the site. We are working on ways to make it easier to find.

kmnorton also had a problem with the find news from your town search link. That hasn’t been as useful as we hoped, but we’re working on it. We also have other ideas for making it easier to find our top stories and stories from a particular town. But don’t be deceived by the “last updated” date when you click on the link. That only refers to the file that contains the link, and that doesn’t change. I justed posted a note on that to make it clear.

Alan Belanger is a Ledger scout in Florida. We’ve already e-mailed, but if anyone else thought it wasn’t such a great idea to run a photo of a butcher holding up a slab of beef next to a story about a young Carver woman receiving a lung transplant. It didn’t bother me, because it seemed pretty clear that they had nothing to do with each other, but if I had thought of it at the time I would have changed the photo. You be glad to hear that it’s so far, so good for the patient, Lindsay Briggs of Carver. Award-winning Enterprise reporter Maureen Boyle taught Lindsay in a course at Stonehill and says she’s a great person. We’re all pulling for her.

KB misses commenting, wonders why the Globe and others can do it but we can’t. We miss it too, except the constant need to take down raunchy and racist comments. The Globe doesn’t allow unfettered commenting and neither do many other papers. We’ll have it again when we can put the fetters on.

Thanks for your interest, and keep reading.

Ken Johnson
Online editor

Talk with us

Posted on February 26, 2008 by kjohnson
Filed Under patriot ledger | 8 Comments

    I was on the beach at St. Simons Island in Georgia last week, balancing the world’s most adorable grandchild on my shoulders, when a bolt of inspiration almost knocked me off my feet.  The new comment feature on our website is pretty cool, but the comments are scattered across so many stories and they come in so fast and furious that it’s impossible to keep up with them. What we needed was one place to talk about general issues of news coverage and our site. What we needed was this blog. I went back to thinking about my granddaughter.

      When I got back to snow on the ground and 20s in the air, I quickly realized the blog couldn’t wait. Thanks to some people with less heart than brains, and not much of either, our comments feature was a mess. On Tuesday we temporarily unplugged it until we have better safeguards for keeping the discussion civil. We did that very reluctantly, because most of the comments were interesting and thoughtful, and we enjoyed the feedback, even when it was critical.  We’ll bring commenting back as soon as possible, maybe even next week. 

       This blog is a different way of talking with us, and it’s intended to be permanent. To participate, you will have to register with a valid e-mail the first time you use it. We will only use the e-mails for issues involving the blog or news coverage, and they won’t be displayed to the public or shared with third parties. Having e-mails will allow us to block people who post comments that don’t follow our terms of use. We also have filters to keep inappropriate material out in the first place. There’s no guarantee. Something offensive will slip by. We’ll just do our best to take it down promptly.

     Also unlike comments, I get a message whenever something is posted here. I can respond or pass it along to another staffer to handle if that makes more sense.  We won’t respond to every comment, but we’ll do the best we can. 

     Please keep you comments to a reasonable length (shorter than this one would be good) and spare us the ALL CAPS. Otherwise have at it. And thanks for your interest in the site.

      Ken Johnson, online editor