McElroy's statement is actually anti Darwinian in most respects, except for the hog wallow effect, where some denizens create an environment so malodorous that everyone leaves except the hogs which apparently like living in shit.

I know of no Progressive site that filters ideas based on disagreement with ideology or policy, as McElroy implies. I know several that filter fact free or selective fact bull hockey. What most of us are trying to create is something like Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" filter, which I have given up on trying to explain to most conservatives, but is an outgrowth of basic scientific method applied to ideas instead of data.

McElroy does not want fact based reasoning to dominate his comments. he would lose most of his commenters and revenue thereby.

Jensen (who seems like a mostly reasonable and OK guy in person) said in the roundtable that the KNS "blogs" don't belong to the KNS, they belong to the users. So there you go.

I've been told that on many occasions as well. Although none of the self-appointed owners who tell me that have stepped up to pay the server bills or compensate the actual owners and volunteers for their time and effort in maintaining the site.

Anyway, my take away is that the KNS actually saw KnoxViews as some kind of threat, and I'm tickled that they admit it publicly. (Makes you reflect on some certain editorial decisions along the way, but that's neither here nor there.) McElroy is basically saying "there are some page views that should be ours and generating ad revenues for us."

There's some validity to his argument that this site tilts the conversation towards a liberal, progressive point of view, and because that's the purpose of the site I'm tickled that he perceives it that way. But the argument is a little weak as justification for looser editorial standards, and it's not like KnoxViews was the only game in town.

At any rate, the article leaves out one important quote from me. Well, two. First, I told both Jacks (Lail and McElroy) that yes, traffic dropped off at KnoxViews, but it's traffic I don't want and they are welcome to it.

Second, that some of the stuff they allow does not reflect the attitude of our community at large, no more than the liberal opinions at KnoxViews represent the Red State mentality of East Tennessee. So to the extent that exposing racism or other hateful attitudes that exist in the community may be healthy (an opinion expressed by several at the roundtable), allowing a vocal and hateful few to to dominate the conversation such that it discourages reasonable people from participating does not promote better journalism or reader understanding nor does it reflect well on their brand or the community.

Otherwise, this is an interesting article on the evolution of interactive mainstream media. And I do commend the KNS and Jack and Jack for taking proactive steps to steer user participation in a productive direction. There were several good suggestions at the roundtable and the KNS has implemented many of them and it has definitely resulted in improvements.

No online commenting policy can fix the hate, though. At some point every site has to think about how much of it they are willing to tolerate to generate heated discussions that generate page views. It's a tough problem, especially on the scale the KNS is dealing with and especially in light of dwindling revenues and resources.

Its been a long time since the Sentinel was the "nexus of community dialogue" and I can't see it ever becoming that again.

Anyone know if you can start a discussion on your own topic at Knoxnews? I just tried to find any capability like that and couldn't. How can you claim to be a "nexus of community dialogue" when you shut the community out of anything but commenting on your own poorly written, narrow minded, misinformed drivel.

-Sugarfatpie (AKA Alex Pulsipher)

"X-Rays are a hoax."-Lord Kelvin

It was an interesting column. I am still trying to distill all of it in that Carlson covered a great deal of ground.

I agree that the KNS sought to do whatever it had to do to get back readership from KnoxViews which it perceived as one of the leaders in the local Internet opinion readership. The KNS stumbled a lot in trying to get the readership. One of the biggest mistakes the two Jack's made was the self policing policy. Three people could work together and ban anyone regardless of the content of what was written. It was lazy. The two Jack's just didn't want to have their staff read all the comments.

Carlson left out the double standards employed by the KNS editors. He probably didn't know as he is new to Knoxville. When Tim Burchett got married comments became so ugly and so outrageous that the comments were all removed and further comments were turned off. So why did the two Jack's not do that for the Christian Newsom families when comments went far past ugly and so outrageous? Is it because the KNS doesn't care about those families the way it does about Tim Burchett?

I thought the way the KNS treated the Christian Newsom families was one of the most hypocritical things the paper has ever done.

...to forfeit the lion’s share of community dialogue to a site driven by a particular set of political and social values could have marginalized a great many other community voices...

"Wow, this KnoxViews site is creating an audience for thoughtful discussion of regional politics from a non-Republican point of view. Look at all that potential revenue that they're leaving on the table!"

(It's downright hilarious to think that this cadre of New Urbanist Hipster Elitists could marginalize the community voices that now form the core of the KNS commentary audience. Here I thought that we were considered marginal from the get-go.)

____________________________

Calling to the underworld. Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls.

what might be more telling is if KnoxNews actually shared their click-through rates on advertising. Betcha a lot of those "un-reasoned and not-well-thought-out" commenters don't contribute much to conversion rates. They're only promoting unique visitors, total page views, total visits, and total time on their media kit. Nothing about clicks here, either. If a lot of the "total time on site" is spent by folks like cjensen buried down in the comments, they're not seeing those top spot ads.

Careful what you are buying, advertisers.

Not really surprising that print media - and even more on cable news networks - are attempting to capture the intense activity of readers and writers online. I would think the immense success of this forum, and others, is due to the reality that traditional media had utterly marginalized and ignored large sections of the communities they are supposed to serve. And much of that success is due to much hard work by the writers and readers here.
As for the level of discourse the KNS wants or imagines it has, seems the recent FBI investigation into public comments regarding the Christian-Newsom murders says volumes about that level of discourse.

Still, KNS efforts online are far ahead of most newspaper sites in East TN. But it is likewise notable their efforts are seen as part of their revenue strategy.

As I reported Tuesday, Congressman Duncan enters public forum and wants a piece of you.

Sometimes I doubt my relevance here. My posts receive slightly above average votes, but very few comments (except the Joe Wilson piece). What does that mean?