Moderation in Excess
County Clerk and Register of Deeds Larry Kestenbaum gets banned from the Ann Arbor News online forum for no apparent reason (the post where he explains that he was banned was removed, along with all responding comments.) The moderator(s) of the forum are mysterious, unnamed presences online, but it seems fair to ask in what capacity they work for the News, and whether their decisions reflect News editorial policy.
c’est amusant. Where’s Nancy Drew when you need her? And why does so much of the inner workings of this city sound like middle school bickering and retribution methodology?
posted by Jen on September 26th, 2005 at 1:44 amdoes=do
posted by Jen on September 26th, 2005 at 1:44 amMaybe they think he’s under the age of 13.
posted by Heidi on September 26th, 2005 at 2:14 amnot likely. Kestenbaum is pretty well-known. he’s also, from what I’ve seen on this blog, pretty reasonable, which may have been his downfall.
posted by Joy on September 26th, 2005 at 8:13 amno, does=does
posted by k on September 26th, 2005 at 8:59 amI look in at the AA forum every now and again, generally when my neck is stiff and I feel it needs exercising, as when I read the chatter there all I can do is slowly shake my head side to side in disbelief.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the forum is very heavily dominated by right-wing conservatives with usernames like “ElRushbo”, and it’s difficult for anyone- even a ‘moderate conservative’- to say anything without a resulting flamewar taking place in which they’re branded a ‘Typical liberal’, ‘Tax and spend demon-crat”, etc.
Larry’s theory (about being an elected official, and thus banned from editorials) makes some sense, but I think it’s equally probable that other users simply filed enough complaints about the fact that he was being too level-headed, and the AA News was forced to comply with their wishes.
On a personal grievance note, the news has gotten very lazy with archiving old stories, which can make a lot of posts on blogs like yours fairly meaningless after just a few weeks. So, not only are they an ineffective source for the ‘real-time’ exchange of ideas (the forum), they’re also doing a poor job of being the community’s historical record, which is one of the most important roles a paper should fill.
posted by brett on September 26th, 2005 at 12:19 pmI browse through the forums every so often and all I see is political flamewars. They also have one of the crummiest interfaces. Howabout ArborSpeech, ArborWiki, ArborForums, anyone?
posted by Matt Hampel on September 26th, 2005 at 3:57 pmI somewhat suspect that the News isn’t being “lazy” about archiving stories, but that they’re quietly sabotaging the competition. (That’d be all of us.) They also seem to have fewer of the “good” stories online these days and more stories where the lead paragraph is mysteriously missing from the online version then they did a year ago. All of this is purely subjective, of course; I have no data.
I suppose I could write them and ask what’s up, but more fun to think that they actually consider us competition.
posted by Murph on September 26th, 2005 at 6:43 pmMaybe they think he’s under the age of 13 = Sarcasm
posted by Heidi on September 26th, 2005 at 7:13 pmWhy would it hinder the competition to leave the first paragraph off of their news stories?
posted by Anna on September 26th, 2005 at 10:40 pmIt means they can’t be quoted or effectively linked to. It’s an attempt to preserve the dead-tree format.
posted by Dale on September 27th, 2005 at 11:02 amOn the subject of non-usability, the AA news also has the (admittedly short and quick to fill out) free registration page you have to go through, which I seldom think of (as I long ago registered as a 99-year-old woman from Akron, Ohio), but every time a blog links to a story and a reader follows it, they may just quickly use their back button upon encountering that page.
I think Murph’s ‘paranoia’ is very well justified, as all the News has to do with archiving is assign each story a permanent url to begin with; the amount of memory taken up by text archives on their servers would be miniscule in comparison with the various flash ads on every single page of the site.
posted by brett on September 27th, 2005 at 1:30 pmWell, I received a letter from the editor-in-chief of Mlive.com, citing AAIO, and letting me know that my account access had been restored. See my blog for details.
Many thanks to AAIO for getting their attention!
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on September 29th, 2005 at 10:44 pmWow…I think this is the first time I’ve ever gotten a concrete result! (Unless you count the time that someone deleted her entire blog because of something I posted about it.)
posted by ann arbor is overrated on September 30th, 2005 at 1:16 amYes, I said it! HAM!!!!!!!
posted by Dale on September 30th, 2005 at 9:05 ammy (jock) daughters like to troll the cheerleaders forum. apparently, all you have to do to get a thousand blondes frothing online is post a message with the headline “cheerleading is not a sport.”
or so they tell me.
posted by peter honeyman on September 30th, 2005 at 9:38 am