Is We Smarter Than Me When the Commenters are Racists?

Are Newspaper comments worthless? They are when the articles are about big city crime.

Let’s look at two pieces from Thursday. The Chicago Tribune reported on a morning robbery at a Streeterville (I was afraid that name was being phased out, it has a great history) movie theater. At the Philadelphia Daily News, Will Bunch’s Memo to media, candidates: That UFO in Philly was a bullet pointed the “obliviousness” of the Tim Russert, Brian Williams and the Democratic Presidential candidates to what was occurring around them in West Philly.

[Y]ou’d think it would be a big deal that a convicted murderer who’d just shot up four people, including a Philadelphia police officer, had been running around almost literally a stone’s throw from a room where seven major Democratic candidates for president were in the same stage, surrounded by numerous VIPs. But in one of the saddest example of life-as-metaphor that I’ve seen in a long time, the presidential wannabees and their bizarre media inquisitors, Tim Russert and Brian Williams, stayed inside their hermetically sealed bubble of a so-called democratic (small “d”) process, completely to oblivious that the street outside Drexel University was running red with the blood of a great American city.

Each article generated a couple of dozen comments, the Tribune’s are housed at Topix. There may be a couple of worthwhile observations among them, but what stands out is the racism– and the attempst by some valiant souls to counteract the jerks through rational argument. One could argue that the high ratio of racist-to-worthwhile comments is itself informative and reflective of the society in which we live, but there are better ways to see America’s ugly side. And there are better ways to spend one’s time than reading the comments on newspaper websites.

Participatory Media and UGC: Myth or Building to Symbiosis?

Via Chuq, Scott Karp makes the case that User-Generated Content is a myth:

A whole mythology is emerging around the idea of “users” — consumers, fans, regular average folk — creating content that media companies and brands can leverage. It’s a compelling idea — but it’s a myth. The reality is that “average people” don’t create a lot of content — at least not the commercially viable kind. Most people are too busy. Those that do “create content” — and who do it well — are those who are predisposed to being content creators. The have some relevant skills, training, raw talent, motivation, something.

Good discussion in the comments.

Chuq wants us to distinguish identity, and I would add sharing, from content creation. “What goes on on facebook isn’t necessarily content creation. Setting up a profile isn’t really getting involved in content creation.”

On the other hand,  Nate Ritter and Josh Catone review the ways in which participatory media has contributed to our understanding of the SoCal fires. Writing at ReadWriteWeb Catone says the fires have highlighted “the emerging symbiotic relationship between citizen journalists and the mainstream news media.”

Many news outlets have solicited, and subsequently used, submissions from people capturing news with cell phone cameras and on blogs (and Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) Multimedia platform Veeker, which last week signed a deal with NBC to handle viewer uploads in 10 major cities, said that NBC San Diego recieved over 2000 submissions of pictures and video related to the wildfires. CNN’s I-Reports section reportedly received about the same number of fire-related submissions.

 (Not unrelatedly, NewAssignment.net’s Off the Bus project was covered in the NYT the other day.) 

 

Finally, Stephanie Kanowitz reminds us that even august journalistic entities like CNN can feature goofy news by summarizing some recent CNN “Latest News” headlines:

• Sheep costume turns man into human torch
• T.I. released on $3 million bond
• When Britney Spears went bad
• TV sex scenes getting so hot they rival porn
• Ghouls, goblins gather for happiest day
• Shatner zapped from new ‘Star Trek’ movie
• Boy, 4, kisses beluga whale