[Imc-web] What's Local -- What's Not

[Mike Lehman]

Jason,
My comments are interspresed below.

JASON MIEREK wrote:
> 
> "Now I see that it has migrated back to the Local Newswire. I guess I'm
> OK with that, but it also opens us up to charges of discrimination in
> what is considered local news. Why should we kick spammers like DAN off
> of the Local wire for reposts from a different point of view, but let
> gehrig post this particular story there?"
> 
> Mike, when you say that the post "migrated back" does this mean that the
> poster moved the story back to the Local Newswire?

I was thinking that one of the other people who are editors might have
moved it back. But since it is possible for the poster to change things
between Newswires by re-editing an article, I was kind of throwing out
the idea to see if anyone else knew anything about moving it back. 

> I agree that this is a
> good issue to discuss tomorrow evening.

What we discuss could take different turns depending on whether it was
the editor or the poster who moved things back. Since we do NOT have an
explicitly posted policy about what is suitable as "local" news, we may
want to take that up. It may not even be possible to arrive at a
consensus among ourselves about what the policy should be stated as. We
have a general understanding (I think) amongst those who have been doing
editorial policy things, but adopting a statement to go with an implict
policy means making things explicit in such a way as to not to offend
posters who may not have been aware about the previous implicit policy.

Or something like that...

> Perhaps we already have an implicit
> policy---you call DAN a "spammer"---it is okay if folks repost occasionally
> (maybe they did not know it was a repost), but if they take up too much
> space or keep doing something after they've been asked to stop (these are
> the behaviors I assume bring on the label "spammer") then we move to stage
> two and deal with them.

I perhaps wasn't clear enough about what I was getting at here. I
certainly wasn't trying to compare this to the DAN situation. DAN is the
kind of guy who'll flood your website with 400 posts over a six-hour
period just because he has nothing better to do with his sorry-ass life
and then accuse you of being controlled by the "Z-i-i-ionists" because
you don't like the fact that he was trying to repost the same 4 stories
with bloody graphics about how many houses the IDF crushed three months
ago over and over.

The whole issue of Palestine vs Israel is so politcally charged that it
is especially important to be even-handed about how we apply our
policies. DAN is simply a neo-Nazi dressed in pro-Palestinian drag who
hopes he can troll up enough hate to get his fill. 

On the other hand, gehrig is someone who is interested in serious dialog
about the situation and may simply have assumed that someone who is a
local can repost a story that is admittedly relevant to the Middle East
to the Local Newswire. I think our standard has been somewhat different
than that in the past, but with the new Web group, I'd like to see what
others think before imposing arbitrarily what has been an implicit
policy, rather than an explicit one.
Mike