This week, Twitter users were talking about The Times' coverage of the "Whitey" Bulger arrest, the switch to Facebook commenting for blogs, accuracy and writing.
A roundup of comments, compiled by intern Ebony Bailey...
Newsroom intern Ebony Bailey, a USC student, put together this roundup of Twitter comments about the Times and its journalism. She'll be doing it each week, and we'll publish here it on Fridays.
Here are some comments from this week...
On Friday, the state of Alaska released more than 24,000 pages of emails sent and received by Sarah Palin during her term as governor. The Times published those emails in a database, Sarah Palin emails: The Alaska Archive.
The Times has come under criticism for publishing the emails, as have other major news organizations that received the government documents under a public records request made in 2008 after Palin was named John McCain's vice presidential running mate.
Some readers, like Marcia Goodman of Long Beach, just weren't interested in the documents. "Why does anyone care what a former governor and never-will-be presidential candidate said several years ago?" Goodman wrote to The Times.
Edward Golden of Northridge called the exercise much ado about nothing. "Fifty-three inches of space on a non-story about Palin's mundane emails," Golden wrote. "And your point is?"
And William deLorimier of San Gabriel saw a double standard by The Times. "I really question your journalistic standards when you show so much glee in the release of Sarah Palin's emails while she was governor of Alaska," deLorimier emailed. "I wish you people would show more journalistic tenacity in retrieving the current president's transcripts from Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School."
A Monday story headlined "Israel fires on pro-Palestinian protesters; 20 reported killed" drew more than 700 comments in its first three days online. As with many stories about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the comments had moved far beyond the news report and had devolved into personal attacks and hateful speech.
On Thursday afternoon, comments on the article were restricted, which means they'll only be posted with a moderator's approval. A note in the comments section from Reader Engagement Editor Martin Beck says, "It's our opinion that this discussion has run its course. And moderators will be setting a *very* high bar for approval of any more comments."
The Times is committed to allowing an online discussion. In an April 2010 memo, Editor Russ Stanton explained: "As unfettered as the discussions may be, they are worth hosting -- and cultivating. The fact is, readers of online news expect to be able to participate. They want to be able to share their opinions and interact with journalists and other readers."
Comments on news articles (as opposed to blogs) run through an automated profanity filter, then are posted automatically. The idea, as announced in that 2010 memo, is that the commenting community will police itself, with users being able to report inappropriate comments as abuse. Any comment reported twice will automatically be removed from the site. These hidden comments will be held for review by a small group of Times moderators, who will decide whether to republish the comments or keep them off the site.
More often than not, this works.
But a few hot-button topics seem to bring out the worst in online commenters: immigration, LGBT issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Monday's article about the protesters was no exception. On Wednesday, Beck posted this caution:
"Our aim is to provide a forum for civil discussion of our articles and the issues raised within. Clearly, our goal of civility is falling short on this thread (and on many articles about the Israel-Palestine conflict).
"We ask commenters to be as cordial as possible and stop using loaded terms (including but not limited to anti-Semite, brown shirt, Nazi, paid-propagandist) to describe other posters."
In an email Thursday, Beck said, "I'd say the comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the toughest to manage, largely because the topic itself is so contentious.
"It’s very difficult for us to figure out a commenter’s intentions by reading a comment. Did they mean a statement to be anti-Semitic? We go through that with every comment that’s flagged or moderated."
Memo from Managing Editor Jimmy Orr about May 2011 traffic to latimes.com:
Another great month at latimes.com. More and more people are reading our journalism than ever before.
May 2011 was the second-most-trafficked month in the history of the site. Sound familiar? We said the same thing last month. And like April, May was about consistency rather than a big spike or two. No big, big jumps in traffic on any one day in May. Instead, consistent, balanced growth told the tale.
We recorded 189.5 million page views in May. This is only 6 million page views shy of our record posted this past March and more than 30 million page views higher than April’s output.
We’re on a good track. Consider this:
Progress
How are we getting there? Many ways. Search traffic is stronger than ever – almost double the amount from this time last year.
With a coordinated refocus on search (thanks, Mark McGonigle, Loree Matsui and the entire copy desk team), search traffic has exploded. Consider May 2010. Traffic from Google resulted in 21.8 million page views. May 2011? Traffic from Google resulted in 41.7 million page views.
Search is not dead. It remains an important part of our strategy. Every visitor is important.
A memo from Managing Editor/Online Jimmy Orr:
It was another great month for latimes.com -– recording its second-highest-trafficked month in the history of the site, with 159 million page views. This is a 20% increase from our average in 2010 and falls short only of last month’s record.
Not surprisingly, the day the Pulitzer Prizes were announced was among the most trafficked days in April. Readers who came to The Times to learn more about the Pulitzer-winning work got a timeline tracking the Bell salary scandal, as well as full coverage. They also could view the great photos taken by feature photography winner Barbara Davidson and breaking-news photography finalist Carolyn Cole, as well as other award-winning work from throughout the year.
Unlike with the March numbers, with which we could point to the coverage of one news event as a driving force, April was a much more balanced effort with increases across the site.
A memo from Managing Editor/Online Jimmy Orr:
Latimes.com hit a record 195.2 million page views for March. This easily trumps our previous best of 153.6 million in December 2010. We also saw a record number of 33 million unique visitors -- a jump of more than 8 million over our previous high in October 2010. And we saw our page views per visit increase significantly as well.
News events, of course, contributed to these records: the Japan earthquake and its aftermath; the death of Elizabeth Taylor; the unrest in North Africa and the Mideast; baseball’s opening day; and Charlie Sheen’s drama, to name a few.
But it was the way we covered events -- not the events themselves -- that made the difference. Bruce Wallace reports that Jeff Fleishman’s wife, living in Cairo in the midst of the madness, said she found Molly Hennessy-Fiske’s reporting on the blog to be among the most innovative and interesting anywhere.
It was the continuous publication of new stories on topics people were interested in that contributed greatly to the record numbers. Frequently posting new stories, not merely updating existing ones, made the difference. This successful strategy better serves our readers.
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