Only in print… for a day
We have a hell of a story coming at you in tomorrow’s paper. Reporter Gail Schontzler interviewed Georgia Smith, the woman who was shot five… Read More »Only in print… for a day
We have a hell of a story coming at you in tomorrow’s paper. Reporter Gail Schontzler interviewed Georgia Smith, the woman who was shot five… Read More »Only in print… for a day
Details of how you can see historical front pages of the Chronicle during our centennial year.
A look at how the Chronicle handles corrections and why this is so important.
Should websites provide users with informal rules as to how their comments will be moderated and reviewed?
On Saturday evening, the Chronicle will almost certainly do something it has never done before. We will post an in-house promotion on our Facebook page.
Two weeks ago, the Chronicle launched a weekend version of its website.
Advertisements placed into KBZK’s stream of news on Facebook have prompted me to go over the Chronicle’s rationale about not putting ads in its Facebook stream.
The Chronicle has added a message banner to the top of our homepage encouraging readers to pay for the news. This post explains why we had to add it.
The Chronicle has launched a brand new incarnation of its famed and much-loved Montana State University sports blog, Blue & Gold.
Another one of those journalism ethics situations cropped up today. An employee of a local businesses asked us to remove comments from a story on the Chronicle website because they were, the employee said, incorrect.
The Context
On Sunday, I published my second story about Montana Opticom’s $64 million stimulus award to bury fiber-optic cable in Gallatin County. Many local companies questioned the government’s decision to award the money, enough that it prompted a follow-up story.
Beneath that story, two commenters posted comments critical of one of the companies mentioned in the article. I’m not going to tell you which one. You can figure that out for yourself if you really want to, and besides, the company’s name is not really important to the ethical issues at hand.
One of the commenters was angry with the service he was receiving from the company, saying that it was the only company he had available in his area. The other commenter posted details of the broadband plans available to him through the company.
The Request
This morning, I watched two “report as abuse” e-mails come into my e-mail inbox, flagging both of these comments as “abuse.” By the e-mail address, I could tell that the person doing the flagging was an employee of the company.
Sure enough, a few minutes later I received an e-mail from the same person asking me to remove the comments because they were incorrect.
To provide some more context, I must in fairness say that we had, on a past story, removed a comment at the company’s request because it was, a different employee of the company said, incorrect.
In retrospect, that was the wrong thing to do.