Newspaper editor retires amidst ‘all the noise’ of commenters

by Abigail Prendergast (Guest contributor/Digital Journalist)

John Irby retired from his position as editor at the Bismarck Tribune on Sept. 9, saying he could not handle the “civil discourse” of anonymous user comments. Irby wrote candidly about his resignation, saying he was sick of being a scapegoat.

Irby had quite the run in the journalism world – he has spent the past 40 years in the industry, with four-and-a-half of them working for North Dakota’s Bismarck Tribune.

The 61-year-old newspaper editor announced his September 9 retirement last week due to the fact that his “skin has thinned” regarding anonymous comments on the paper’s website.

“I am retiring because I am tired of being the whipping boy,” Irby said bluntly in a final column in last Sunday’s issue of the Tribune. “Life is too short to put up with all the noise.”

With the editor’s farewell and last piece came once again the debate of online etiquette and if news media formats even have any grounds to patrol it. According to the website Poynter, Irby himself says he is not necessarily against the online comments themselves, but instead wanted “controls to encourage civil discourse.”

“When people don’t have to sign their names to their words, they become more careless,” Irby said. “The discourse is not as civil as it once was, particularly because of anonymous comments.”

Several news media websites have played around with various ideas in an effort to keep comments and discussions civil within the seemingly no-holds-barred world of online commenting.

While some sites are perfectly content with anonymity, others feel necessity for users to identify themselves. “They add a great deal to the debate, and I think anonymity is important. … Anonymity makes people more honest,” Rob Port, operator of SayAnythingBlog.com said. “Do anonymous blog comments make discourse less civil? That presumes the discourse was civil before blogging and blog comments, which it wasn’t.”

As far as Irby is concerned, there is “less tolerance for alternative points of view and that’s what journalism has always been about — about presenting as many different voices as possible.” He went on to point out that it is getting “increasingly hard to do that in journalism without getting attacked.”

Chad Nodland, an attorney in Bismarck and member of NorthDecoder.com, said that Web forums can be a means for the “civil” dialogue Irby speaks of – but he confesses that the user content can and does go awry.

“I’m generally for civil discourse,” said Nodland. “The unfortunate truth, though, is that much of the discourse in the world over the past 20 or 30 years has been pretty uncivil.”

This article was originally published on Digital Journal [Link]