Kurt Greenbaum has apologized for overreacting in his original response to this incident, although he doesn’t explicitly say that he is sorry for calling the school and indirectly causing someone to lose their job.

As someone whose job involves thinking about our social-media policies and our approach to comment behaviour, I’m always looking at what other newspapers and media outlets are doing, and today I came across a case that crossed a line — for me, at least — in terms of how to deal with problem commenters. It involved a vulgar comment made by a user at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s website, and the response by the site’s director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum.

According to Greenbaum’s blog post (which was mirrored on his personal blog), someone posted a comment on a story in which they used a colloquial or slang term for female genitalia. It was deleted, but then was reposted. Greenbaum says he noticed that the comment alert from Wordpress showed that it came from a nearby school. So Greenbaum called the school, and they asked him to send them the email with the comment, which he apparently did. About six hours later, he says, the school called and said that an employee had been confronted and that he had resigned.

Am I the only one who thinks that doing this goes way beyond the normal course of editorial behaviour? I’ve been moderating blog comments and story comments for several years now, both as a blogger and as the Globe and Mail’s social-media editor (or Communities Editor, as we call the job), and there is no way that I would contact someone’s workplace about a comment unless they had done something extremely egregious — such as making death threats, or repeatedly making abusive comments.

We’ve had hundreds or even thousands of such comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum is talking about, and I have never contacted someone’s workplace, even when it was obvious that the person in question worked for the federal government.

I know I’m not the only one to see Greenbaum’s behaviour as over-the-top, because a number of people agreed with me on Twitter when I asked the same question, and just as many or more took the social-media editor to task in the comments on his blog post. One commenter said:

“You guys don’t like moderating so you call his work and get him fired. Nice. Happy holidays.”

to which Greenbaum replied:

“Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com’s Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the “submit” key. Interesting perspective. Thanks for your contribution.”

Other readers said:

“What an abuse of power, Mr. Greenbaum!!! So is the Post Dispatch now a Gestapo Agent? What a sick and terrible thing you did to this employee in an economy where he probably doesn’t stand a chance in getting another job! I recommend that YOU get fired for abuse of power!!!!! See how YOU feel!!!”

and

“YOU are the director of social media? tools to be leveraged to get businesses closer to their customers? what an awful story and it’s even more embarassing that you squawk about it after the fact. the lesson is: be careful StlToday website visitors - never know when a bored employee will pursue some bizarre investigation that could cost you your job.”

and Greenbaum replies:

“Defend the guy who posted the vulgarity all you want. I’m not regulating someone’s thought. He can think whatever he wants. I’m moderating our boards. Follow our guidelines and this won’t be a problem for any of you. Remember, I said it was a school, right? It could have been a student. I didn’t know who it was. I just thought the school might like to know about it. I sleep fine at night.”

What do you think of what Greenbaum did in this case? Did he overstep his bounds as the moderator of the St. Louis Today site, or do you think he was justified in what he did? Let me know in the comments.

Murdoch is simply jawboning. Three months ago he promised that News Corp. would start charging for its newspapers by June 2010. Now he doubts that the company will hit that mark. In typical Murdochian fashion, he’s sowing confusion and harvesting bewilderment.

and

If it were in News Corp.’s economic interests to dig an Internet moat around its newspaper properties, Murdoch would have already done it rather than talk about it. Instead, he’s shouting about it to signal to his competitors 1) where he’d like to take News Corp. and 2) his desperate desire for them to follow.

Mark Cuban is convinced that it’s worth it for Murdoch to at least try to do without Google, since there’s the chance that it might actually pay off, and if it doesn’t then he can just re-enter the index and things will go back to normal (I’m not sure that’s the case, but then I’m not a media mogul like Mark). But Mike Arrington at TechCrunch does the best job of laying out what might be at the core of Rupert’s strategy (assuming he isn’t just blustering).

In a nutshell, the idea is that Rupert cuts a deal with either Microsoft or Yahoo to index his sites (similar to the deal he cut with Google to index MySpace), and hopes that this encourages other major media outlets to do the same. If he can get enough to jump on board — and it sounds like Associated Press is halfway there already — the thinking is he could put pressure on Google to pay up as well. Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe has some more ammunition for this view, with reports of secret negotiations between Microsoft and some of the major publishers.

Erick Schonfeld has compared this “Come on, boys — let’s give Google what for!” strategy to the final scene in the movie Gallipoli, and to a military strategy from Blackadder (I’ve chosen General George Armstrong Custer). But whether it’s Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn or Gallipoli or Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the underlying point is that Murdoch’s approach seems futile. Will other media outlets join his crusade? Perhaps — but I doubt enough of them to make a difference.

Will people switch search engines in order to get specific content from specific media outlets? I highly doubt it. Of course, all Rupert has to do is convince Microsoft or Yahoo that they will do so, and then get them to pay him. Even in failing, the old bugger could still wind up winning.

Update:

Jeff Jarvis explains why there is approximately zero chance of anyone important joining Murdoch’s anti-Google crusade.

Whose fault is that? Probably the Times, for forcing the story into the standard format rather than trying something different, but assigning blame is hardly the point. And in any case, the NYT should be given all kinds of credit for experimenting with the Spot.us partnership, and for being so flexible that Spot.us founder and all-around smart guy David “Digidave” Cohn — whom I respect and I admire — said the Grey Old Lady “interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup.” High praise indeed.

But to get back to my main point, if you look at the NYT story you see (or at least I saw) exactly what Megan describes in her post at CJR: a story that repeats a lot of known information about the Great Garbage Patch, with very little of the human side of Lindsay’s story. I found her personal blog far more interesting, and I bet I’m not the only one. She talks about — and shows photos of — the Mahi Mahi the crew ate so much of, the cramped quarters that the crew inhabited, the gourmet meals whipped up by the ship’s cook, and the garbage the ship came across along the way.

Obviously, not every news story deserves the blog treatment, but I think this one certainly did. I got far more out of it, was far more engaged with it, cared more about it and identified more with the reporter at the centre of it. A great job by Lindsay, and despite the criticisms of the outcome, a great effort by Spot.us as well. Dave Cohn describes the genesis of the project and the process it went through, as well as some of the lessons learned.

Mark Cuban, another crusty old billionaire (although just a pup compared to Rupe), used these remarks as a jumping-off point for his own flight of rhetorical fancy, in which he argued that social-recommendation networks such as Twitter and Facebook were far more important than Google, and that therefore Rupert was right and all the “information-must-be-free bigots” who criticized him must be wrong. But as Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) pointed out on Twitter after I posted a link to Cuban’s rant, all the social-recommendations in the world aren’t going to help Rupert if he insists on putting his content behind pay walls.

David Santori made a similar point in a comment on one of my paywall-related posts at the Nieman Journalism Lab. As he put it:

“overlooked in all this is the social aspect: any web item that interests or amuses or intrigues me, I want to share. And if I can’t share it promptly and easily — in an email link or on my blog or Facebook “wall” or in a tweet — I will be frustrated and irked just in proportion to the degree of interest I felt in the item.”

and

“The NYT registration barrier was in fact a micropayment system, one in which the payment was extracted in the form of the reader’s time and keystrokes to log in whenever they got a link to a useful story.”

I think both David and Steve make an excellent point, one which publishers ignore at their peril. Readers online may not pay you directly with currency, but they pay you with their time and attention (the foundation of the so-called “attention economy”) and it’s in your interest to make things as easy for them as possible — which is just one strike amongst many against pay walls. And if Mark Cuban is right (which I think he is) about social recommendations becoming increasingly important as a way to find valuable content, what happens when someone shares a link to your pay-walled content?

What happens is a potential reader runs headfirst into that wall, or has to jump through all sorts of hoops to read it (i.e., check to see if there is a Google News loophole), and that is a significant disincentive to a) read anything further, or b) share any links themselves. It’s the classic cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face problem: you try to generate incremental revenue through restricted access, but by doing so you deprive your content of even more valuable re-distribution through recommendation networks, which in the long run reduces your traffic and thus your revenue.

Tearah Moore, who recently returned from Iraq, posted a number of comments about what was happening, including the fact that stretchers were being brought in, that one person had allegedly been shot in the testicles, and that the shooter had died. Among other things, Carr notes that Moore’s tweet about the shooter being dead was wrong (although she didn’t say that she knew this, she just commented on it). But his main complaint seems to be that her tweets about someone being shot in the testicles, etc. had no redeeming value and were therefore “entertainment or tragi-porn.”

As he puts it, her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out but was a case of “look at me looking at this.” He then goes on to say that the tweeting of events during protests in Iran did nothing to actually change events in that country, and that all of this so-called “citizen journalism” is merely selfish and egotistical. And finally, he argues that this applies to the shocking video footage of Neda Agha Soltan’s death in Iran — that the person shooting the video didn’t try to help, but simply engaged in a cruel and unfeeling act of voyeurism.

The question of whether bystanders or observers should intervene in emergency situation is a worthwhile debate to have, but I don’t think Carr’s examples meet the test.

Tearah Moore isn’t a medical person, nor was she a military police officer, so the idea that she should have either been helping victims or tracking down the shooter instead of posting to Twitter is a little absurd. As for Neda Soltan, she was being attended to by a doctor while the person videotaping was there. What more could have been done?

As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad that someone was there to videotape it and let the outside world know about it — just as I’m glad someone was there to record Nguyen Van Lem being shot in the head, or Phai Thi Kim Phuc (who now lives in Toronto) running down the road in Vietnam after having her clothes burned off by a napalm attack. Would Carr rather that no one had videotaped Neda’s senseless death at all? It’s one thing to argue that tweeting from Iran was useless, but Neda’s death very clearly galvanized protests in that country, and international criticism. And while Tearah Moore posting observations to Twitter might not have accomplished much either, it easily could have, had events gone in a different direction.

The fact that Moore made mistakes, meanwhile, is also to be expected - she was probably listening to the same broadcasts we all were, which quoted military officials as saying the shooter had been killed. Is that her fault? Dozens of TV stations, radio stations and newspaper websites reported the exact same thing. The same criticisms were made during the Mumbai attacks, when the wrong hotel was identified as being on fire. “Twitter is completely unreliable!” many people cried — but the mainstream media were just as unreliable, as they often are in such intense situations.

Whether social media turns us all into selfish voyeurs is a valuable question to ask, but I don’t think Carr has provided us with any examples that make that case. As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad people feel a compulsion to “report” things that are happening wherever they might be. That is a fundamentally journalistic impulse, and the more people who have it, the better off we will all be — even if we have to put up with errors and misunderstandings along the way. Suw Charman-Anderson has a good post on the topic as well, and feels Carr is attacking a straw man of his own creation. David Quigg has what I think is a smart take on Carr’s post as well, and so does Alex Howard (@digiphile).