Following is the Public Editor column for Sunday, April 8, 2007:
Last week, The News & Observer invited readers to comment on its Web site, newsobserver.com, about the proposal in the General Assembly to apologize for North Carolina's slavery history.
The results were less than enlightening or encouraging for the prospects of civility in public discourse.
"If this country is ever going to move forward, the NAACP should be disbanned, no more gov. freebies, and stop petting and stroking the black community," wrote a contributor who identified himself as "WASP73." "Their ancestors paid the price for them to live in the greatest country, they should take advantage of that instead of the welfare system. After 150 years you should quit pointing fingers and get on with your life."
Maybe there is a place in the blogosphere for this kind of vitriol, but I ask you, should the newspaper be the sponsoring forum? Most of the other comments also were opposed to apology, which is fine, but they made their points more civilly.
This snapshot of online argumentation raises anew the question of whether The N&O, as it ventures further and further into interactive communication, should allow input from outsiders to be anonymous.
Several readers have pointed out the inconsistency of the paper requiring that letters to the editor be signed, while comments to blogs and contributions to forums are allowed to be anonymous, or pseudonymous. Readers justifiably ask: Is that not a lowering of the newspaper's standards?
It's a tricky issue that N&O editors still are sorting out. Their dilemma: the culture, as it were, of the blogosphere is freewheeling debate not constrained by calling-card niceties. The paper wants to be the go-to place in the Triangle for community discussion, and it wants lots of users on its Web site.
But the standards of the newspaper are accountability and responsibility. A newspaper does not want to enter onto the public record information that is false, slanderous or plain odious. The News & Observer is a respected name in the community, and biker-bar brawling cheapens the brand.
"There's a feeling that on one side, if you make people use their names, it squelches dialogue," said David Feld, newsobserver.com editor. "On the other hand, if you allow people to be anonymous, it encourages mischief."
Such as: The paper has scrupulously avoided naming the accuser in the Duke sexual assault case, adhering to its policy of not identifying complainants in sex crimes. But her antagonists in the blogosphere have managed to sneak her name onto The N&O's forums, unnoticed by the powers-that-be until too late.
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Last fall, a reader named Brooks Raiford offered an opinion about the Wake County school bond campaign on the WakeEd blog, attaching his real name, only to find himself and his opinion savaged by others posting to the site anonymously. One even went to the length of looking up the tax value of Raiford's home and posting that. "If your purpose is to offer a civil forum for debate, honest identification should be the norm," Raiford wrote me in an e-mail. "If your purpose is titillating bombast, you've achieved it (hardly an honorable mission for a legitimate news organization)."
This issue isn't confined to The News & Observer. Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz reports that anonymous commenters on a conservative blog site said they wished that accused terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had succeeded in a plot to kill Jimmy Carter. And posters to the liberal Huffington Post "expressed regret that the suicide bomber at a military base in Afghanistan failed to take out the visiting Dick Cheney."
The issue at The N&O has to do in part with manpower and technology. The paper doesn't have enough people to screen in advance the thousands of submissions that come to its blogs and online forums each month. The practice here is to monitor, and if necessary, remove egregiously offensive submissions, post facto. Even that's spotty, because the monitoring is spread over a score or more editors and reporters, some of whom are more punctilious than others. Few items are removed.
Also, current software gives the online overseers only limited capability to trace pseudonyms to the real names of people registered to use the site, so they may or may not be kicked off for "mischief." (Since the beginning of this year, one person has been blocked from the site, for repeated name-calling of another user and only after repeated warnings to cease and desist.) The N&O is moving toward plugging that technological hole.
The bigger issue isn't technology or staffing, but whether the newspaper does see the need for a higher standard of accountability and transparency for its user community than for other corners of the blogosphere. And whether that standard should be the same as the print version. Few, if any, other newspapers around the country require Web-site contributors to identify themselves, said Feld, the online editor.
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The opinion here seems mixed. Managing Editor John Drescher last month posted a blog entry suggesting that people identify themselves (and was promptly shrapneled with some 45 posts, most of them from a handful of people, posting anonymously.) Two editors I talked to last week leaned to anonymity, toward the greater goal of robust debate. As the site grows, the good commentary will drive out the bad, Feld suggests.
I have a different view. Let's go the other direction. The N&O should foster a higher plane of discourse in this supposedly brainy community by requiring accountability of people who use our sites. The paper does so for letters to the editor and still is able to publish (because of space constraints) fewer than a third of the 12,000 letters it receives annually.
Maybe the quantity of comments would go down. But I hope the quality of discussion would go up, which is what a newspaper is about.
What do you think?
The Public Editor can be reached at ted.vaden@newsobserver.com or by calling (919) 836-5700.
Ted Vaden, the N&O public editor, serves as the readers' advocate within the paper. You may contact Ted at (919) 836-5700 or 
