Connelly ponders Chron.commons blogs

In his latest Hairballs column for the Houston Press, Rich Connelly considers some tasteless reader blogs on the Chron.com website.

He asked Chron online guru Dwight Silverman about a couple of them, and got this response:

Blog chief Dwight Silverman says he's fine with what Reyes posted because it was intended to spark a discussion about comics dealing with tragedy, and because commenters took Reyes to task for it.

“You just can't take one comment out of one particular blog entry and say, ‘Okay, that's a bad thing'; you have to look across the whole landscape of it,” he says.

He says the bloggers have to adhere to the Chron's “terms of service,” but he couldn't recall whether those terms included anything about taste.

We pointed Silverman to another reader blog on the Chron page, one which ranked local murderers as potential “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male felon.” One candidate got extra points because his victim was a Bellaire teen, whose smiling photo was posted.

That blog then got taken down.

Now, if the blogger had somehow ranked candidates using the “Hokey Pokey,” he might have been golden.

We've long wondered what exactly the proliferation of reader blogs contributes to the newspaper's core mission (not to mention the judgment of Silverman and others as to what blogs will be granted "featured" Chron.commons status). More recently, we've wondered about the point of certain staff blogs.

But it's entirely possible we don't understand "the whole landscape of it" as well as some of the Chron illuminati. What do readers think?

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/25/07 09:51 PM | Houston Media | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (10)

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