Friday, October 5, 2007

Anonymous postings harmful?

Another fun tidbit from the APME meeting blog:
More than 60% of the editors surveyed said it would be harmful to good journalism to invite users to participate without using their real identities; only 43% of the readers surveyed said it would be harmful.

Is it a safety issue? Is it a credibility issue? Is it a civility issue? Panelists weigh in.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At Bluffton Today, I wanted us to encourage our site's readers to blog under their real names, but I was quickly overruled. I was worried it could turn into one of those professional boards where anonymous journalists rip each other apart. Through visualeditors.com, I had seen that professionals could and would treat each other with some measure of professional decorum if their real names were attached, and that's what I wanted to see at BT.com

Long story longer, my fears were not confirmed. We had problems with a handful of bloggers dominating the conversation, but not with trolls and cheapshot artists.