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A little over five years ago Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn launched his "weblog" as an extension of his print column, and given how botched the online entity of the Trib was (and still is), we're assuming it took a lot of persuasion on Zorn's part. His persistence paid off -- the site now hosts quite a number of blogs from various writers that followed his lead. But being an innovator must also take its toll -- Zorn has grown tired of the "cesspool of spam, vitriol, bigotry, misinformation and spite" and has turned off comments on his blog:
Readers of my comments areas have come to expect that I’ll not only keep out most of the filth via editing or deleting offensive posts , but that I’ll respond to every reasonable challenge that’s issued to me, no matter how small the audience might be for an answer.I no longer want to try to meet those expectations. I'm finding, among other things, that it brings out the worst in me.
So what did he expect? For months now Zorn has abandoned posts about the banjo or Rob Sherman's antics and is making "Obamaist" look like a shill for the Christian Coalition. A typical day at his "Change of Subject" blog includes:
- Why Obama is awesome
- McCain supporters are idiots
- Sarah Palin is an idiot
- Why Obama is super awesome
- "McCain spokesworm" said something stupid
- "Far right radio blowhard" said something stupid
- Obama = new hotness
Which, don't get us wrong, if that's OK with his editors then it's more than OK with us. But in an election year that has cultivated an "us vs. them" climate even more than in 2004, it's bound to bring out the worst in everybody. And if, as he says, many commenters are "smart, funny reasonable people [that] have sparred with [him], located common ground and opened [his] eyes to new points of view," why direct those people to the even more toxic waste dump of Topix if they wish to share, as Zorn is prescribing? Why not instead just scale back the egotism and don't personally respond as often (or at all) any more? Why not relegate the filtering of spam and offensive nonsense to an intern? Turning off comments completely seems like a step backwards for someone self-described as having "been promoting the idea that interacting in public forums with readers would be good" for 15 years. The well-worn phrase "throwing the baby out with the bath water" comes to mind
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Speaking as a chucklehead commenter, I completely understand why Zorn did this.
When you comment on a site you do so at the sufferance of the editors of that site. You can always start your own blog and extoll the virtues of your worldview upon the chattering class til your fingers bleed. But when you do so on another person's site the limit of your verbosity is the patience of your hosts.
If one day I came on Chicagoist and commenting was gone I would not be surprised, a tad sad since the arguments on here, all in good fun and sport, are a welcome distraction. I have a pretty quiet working enviornment and I don't IM or facebook or any of that nonsense. This is the sum total of my internet goofery. And it's at the kind and tender mercies of the folks who run this site that it's here at all.
So Zorn got tired of the run and gun and keeping the shit out (god, having seen some of those comments I can understand, reads like a Bund meeting transcript at times) off his page. He's still Zorn and always a good read.
I can see it though. For instance the comment section at the Reader's clot blog is freaking terrible. The WBEZ blog hardly gets any traffic, but when they post some Obama audio from the archives, it brings out the worst from across the web.
Well, at least now we know where the despicable cartoons from Tim Daly are coming from.
i agree, preston. i think there's got to be a better way, and i really like zorn. saying that, it must have been a real toll on him to make that decision. i've always been surprised he's responded to much to the comments. that's cool, but maybe it's not worth his serenity at this point ...
I was also disappointed to learn that Zorn has cut off his comments. Zorn has been one of the pioneers in traditional Chicago media in making the leap (or should I say connection?) from print to online media. Before his blog, Change of Subject, he had his Mailbag feature on Ericzorn.com (which seems not to be functioning at the moment). I remember it from when I was in j-school, and that was nearly 10 years ago.
I understand where Zorn is coming from; many comments are drivel and worse. If he was moderating his own comments, it probably was a major time suck. But calling it failure as an experiment bothers me on a number of levels. Is media interactivity an experiment? Or is it that traditional media like newspapers still don't get it?
I would say that the failed experiment is the idea that newspapers can simply reproduce traditional content on their websites. News is not static anymore. Social media has changed the rules, the norms, the expectations. And if newspapers want to survive - to truly join the camp of new media - they have to stop responding in old ways.
There's no reason why a columnist should have to filter through dozens of comments to separate the cream from the dreck. As Preston says above, there's no reason why an intern can't do that. Better yet, hire somebody. Hire a community manager whose job it is to oversee comment boards. New media require new jobs. A community manager ought to be an essential position these days.
And there's no reason Zorn should feel obligated to respond to all comments. That's a one-to-many mindset, and it's not how social media works. We are many-to-many. We commenters can respond to each other.
I'm with you, KarenH.
I don't get overly concerned about comment drivel, but if it is so vexing for someone such as Zorn, use interns and comment managers.
Without the community commentary, I won't read. I don't find much of the opinion pieces to be worth reading, but they are a good stepping point for discussion.
Bullseye, Prescott Carlson!
And thanks for the info, or I would not have known that EZ did what he did. I was a participant in the reader give-and-take with EZ from 2003 up until a couple of months ago---when EZ, as you so accurately described above, went off the deep end and started spewing bile at his own readers. I haven't read anything by EZ since then; without reader give and take, his columns are a relatively flat one-way street, as are most newspaper columns.
As a conservative independent who was a fan of Change of Subject and its predecessor blog, I had a lot of respect and admiration for EZ, and I wrote that in a number of posts over the years. For nearly five years, COS was the first thing I read every day when I went to the Trib online. As disgraceful and pathetic as his blog has become in recent months, there's no denying that Eric Zorn's years of work have secured him a place of honor in local and even national journalism history. He was a real pioneer in j-blogging, and his efforts democratized newspapering and therefore enhanced our civic discourse and made our world a little bit better. When he started, he was one of a very few doing what he did. Today, his approach has become a template in the news industry.
For that, he is owed a big debt of gratitude.
I see that he wrote that he did what he did, in part to spend more time with his family in Albany Park. Dunno if he was saying that tongue in cheek or not----but whatever, I wish him all the best.
In my concept of Hell, Zorn, Schmich, and Dippy Doper, are the only columnnists.
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Tim1979 is just spewing chunks when he says he's a conservative independent!
What he is, is a member of the Illinois Combine & undoubtedly has a do-nothing job with either the city or county!
An independent would never have spent so much time on Zorn's blog defending the status quo when it came to taxes, Stroger, Daley & all the myriad problems they have caused here.
In fairness to him, there are too many comments like this:
"Hussein Obama sux he will geehad he be muslim war on USa plus McCain tax only da poor all rich steal peepl BLOW ME money"
Can't they just use a program that can recognize correct English to an extent and be done with it?
So will he turn it back on after all of this madness is pretty much over after Tuesday?