Anonymous darts cause commotion online

Here's tomorrow's column today:

This week started early Sunday with two comments posted on the bottom of our police log on our Web site.

Had we heard about the crash? Were we going out to the scene?

It was those early comments online that pushed us out the door and over to West High School to see what had happened late the night before. Now, at week’s end, I’d venture to say that everyone in Tracy knows a student died and three others were seriously injured in the tragic accident Jan. 27.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes at the Tracy Press, we’ve had technical turmoil that turned to angst. The “comment” function was added to stories online less than a week before the accident at West High. The idea — to allow readers to leave notes, almost like instant letters to the editor or an online bulletin board. I’ve noticed on other newspaper sites that commenters seem to like to chime in with a final word on stories, with a, “Good job, Jake,” or “Boy, are you biased, Betty.”

Little did we know that this new function would produce an explosion in feedback, turning into a public forum where a full range of emotions would be expressed — and managing to wreak havoc on our computer server.

Before Sunday, the Tracy Press site averaged 1,100 hits a day. When we posted the first photo and story about the accident Sunday afternoon, the comments started rolling in, and so did those hits. By Monday, the hits increased tenfold, to more than 10,000. Page views (the number of times users request a page) went from 5,000 to more than 43,000 that day.

Rapid-fire comments were being posted on stories at a rate of one a minute, producing instant-messaging. That’s about the time that Steve Reichgut, owner of SolutionsIC, which hosts our site, had to disable the commenting for a few hours to relieve the overloaded server. The increase in traffic, he said, was massive and the number of comments phenomenal.

On Tuesday, the commenting barely took a breather. One story gathered more than 200 comments online, with tears flowing and tempers flaring.

And that’s where the technical became personal.

Many of comments were wonderful tributes to the teen who died. Some of the memorializing was pure poetry. Other comments, however, were toxic diatribes that assaulted the senses. Members of the community worried — and rightly so — that the families of the young victims would be hurt by the comments. Some said it was irresponsible for us to allow this and pleaded for us to take down all the comments.

On the street, we also heard from parents — some angry at the uncensored comments and others happy to discover a place that served as an outlet for their children’s expression.
Some were merely aghast at the poor writing skills of the commenters.

We started to monitor the site for more than profanity, all the while discussing and debating with everyone, from the publisher to the webmaster, about which posts crossed the line. Cuss words were obvious, but what about criticism? Those who posted comments were quick to point out the insensitive posts, and we removed some of them.

As City Editor Eric Firpo told a reader, “I know that fails to satisfy a lot of people who are offended by some of the postings, which seem tasteless at best. But we’re reluctant to start censoring based on taste, or hurtfulness. Where do we draw the line there? That line is different for everybody and would satisfy no one.”

So it’ll be a never-ending judgment call for individual posts, and we’ll keep monitoring, even when the commotion dies down.

I don’t know where all this is heading. This is new territory. Someday we may look back and cringe at our rudimentary methods of connecting the town through personal comments pasted on online stories.

But community conversation at a time like this, I think, can be good, perhaps, even healthy.

• Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).