The Washington Post online executive editor, Jim Brady, just let me know what’s what regarding the comments situation. He says the site wasn’t requiring a valid e-mail address from commenters:
because we were working through Movable Type, and we had not synched up our registration system with it. But we are hoping to add comments to articles reasonably soon, and when we do that, we’ll have that layer of security. But, after the events of the past week, we now know we need that layer on our MT blogs as well. Lesson learned, I guess. We’ve had these blogs up for a year, and really had no problems, so this one caught us off-guard and understaffed. But we’ll be back on the horse before long; it’s obviously the right thing to do.
This is good news, because it shows that the Post does understand what went wrong and is working to fix it — and to bring reader comments back to the site, where they belong.
on Jan 25th, 2006 at 3:30 am
Leitores também transparentes…
O aumento das formas de participação no discurso mediático abriu, naturalmente, um espaço por onde circula não apenas opinião organizada, debate esclarecido, ou informação fundamentada. Circula muito mais – falsidades, rumores, insultos, por exemplo. N…
on Feb 12th, 2006 at 8:07 am
[…] Brady points out, correctly, that the Abramoff scandal’s unveiling is due in large part to the Post’s own reporting: brilliant and dogged tracking of this sleazy activity that should make the paper proud. But he doesn’t acknowledge that the Post’s online arm enabled the hate-fest by not making its comment system more robust and less prone to gaming. (He knows about the problem, having told me so in a recent email.) Brady somewhat undermines his complaints with this omission. […]