reality bites by James Norton

The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Over the past few years, we have posted many of our print edition stories on our website and we have allowed comments to remain, for the most part, anonymous.  This has allowed for the exercise of free speech in a way and manner for local people to voice their opinions that hadn‚Äôt been seen or heard of before.

We are very proud of our website and have held off converting to another format to maintain the integrity of free commenting and as we reached the milestone of averaging 1,000 unique hits per day, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the process since it began.

Comments have been consistent lately on almost every posted story, but historically the stories with the most ‚Äúlively‚Äù interaction have involved either political or tragic developments.  The most recent being the awful crash on Highland Road with over 140 comments at the time I wrote this column. 

Other notable stories that have generated huge interest and interaction over the years (and I am sure some people will point out ones I missed) were:  Officer Trant, Max Pak, Assembly Square and take your pick of any of the numerous special and regular elections.

In the beginning I had to spend a lot of time ‚Äúrefereeing‚Äù on the website to avoid overtly slanderous statements against ‚Äúcivilians‚Äù and over time my involvement has decreased because readers have naturally become accustomed to the etiquette of online ‚Äúblogging‚Äù.  Personally, I am very thankful for that, because if I had to police the website with the present volume of traffic with the usual cast of characters we started off with, I would have to work full time on it.

‚ÄúJN‚Äôs Rules‚Äù still apply, and even as recently as last week I had to unpublish certain comments and ban a few people for being chuckleheads and dropping ‚ÄúF Bombs‚Äù and saying some really nasty things towards people and about certain situations.  The ‚ÄúRules‚Äù, for those not in the know, are simple ‚Äì don‚Äôt be vulgar (yes using an expletive sometimes can be tasteful to a degree), don‚Äôt be overtly slanderous and make wild and unfounded accusations and most importantly ‚Äì don‚Äôt use external links to outside news sources.

The reason for the last one is simple for us as a news publication – we want people to enjoy reading about local events and news on our site and encourage commenting as well – why would we want someone to go somewhere else to read and then maybe make a comment back on our site, assuming everyone is going to click the external link?

Some have caught on, and instead of the external link, make reference to the other information source and maybe copy and paste some if not all of the information into a comment for others to make comments about ‚Äì keeping it ‚Äúin house‚Äù so to speak.  If you were writing a book or writing an online comment for any other publication as a journalist you wouldn‚Äôt just reference the information source without adding the relative material to what you were writing, so why do it blindly on a website to which you are only posting a comment?  You wouldn‚Äôt, if you had any sense about you.

The good news is, life on our website is for the most part harmonious, with only a few stragglers into the realm of bad taste ‚Äì which will make our transition to a new format (but yes, keeping the ability to post anonymous comments) all the more easier.  Thanks to the regular readers of both the print and online editions of our newspaper for helping make our website the most popular local website around.