I found a funny in this morning's Times-Pic travel section. In an article about the Newseum in Washington D.C., a teenage visitor is overheard saying, "Picayune. That sounds so stupid," when he sees the front page of our local rag exhibited in the hall of "Today's Front Pages".
Well, yeah, I guess it does, to people who don't know about da paper's history.
It seems, however, that its history might be overshadowed by its online presence.
- I can't find the article online that I am referencing here - at least, not yet. And even if it were already up on the nola.com site, I wouldn't be able to find it unless I did a direct search of the article's headline along with its author. The site is difficult to navigate, for certain.
- Even if I could find the article easily, there's the question of whether or not I'd want to bring traffic to it by linking to it:
I read the headlines and get an understanding of what's happening but I don't dig too deep. Sometimes I go a day or two without looking at all. Last night I was playing around on the Internet when I finally checked the news and saw the stories of all the killings. There was a double murder in the Iberville Housing Development that caught my eye because of the location and ages of the victims (There won't be anymore links to news sites on this blog until someone figures out how to clean up the comments section. I am not promoting any websites that condone people disrespecting my race.)
So what's to be done? Do we go so far as to take digital photos of the dead tree T-P to corroborate what we read in the news today (oh, boy)? Do we keep writing the people who run nola.com and tell them what schmucks they are being by not moderating comments, equating "freedom of speech" with "anything goes - even racism, sexism, and just plain offensive talk"? Do we tell kids at the Newseum some of the nicknames we have for our local rag that might enumerate how stupid we think it is sometimes? Or do we support the local daily regardless of it all, because it's ours and it's the only one we've got?
2 comments:
We could go all "Project Mayhem," create a bunch of profiles and fill the comments sections with nonsensical gibberish to drive away these whackjobs or force them to shut it down.
We could label every single comment as inappropriate for even more inappropriate reasons.
But all that would do exactly what the folks that run the side want us to do: give them traffic. Controversey causes it, and the bonehead commentors click on there every (it appears) 45 minutes with several things to say.
Plus, there are good things about nola.com, believe it or not - some of the forums have brought people together on crime in the lower Quarter, for instance, and there are some blogs on there that have good content. So how do you support that without supporting the comments? Will traffic to those places still be taken as support of the mayhem that is the non-monitoring of comments?
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