Washington Post Shuts Down Blog

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 20, 2006 @09:02AM from the sounds-familiar dept.

Billosaur writes "C|Net has an article by Katharine Q. Seelye of The New York Times, which indicates that the Washington Post is having to close one of its blogs, due to 'too many personal attacks, profanity and hate mail directed at the paper's ombudsman.' It seems that Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman, wrote an article on the Jack Abramoff scandal which elicited a storm of protest and led to readers using profanity and making unprintable comments, which the paper had to take extra care in removing. This was apparently more based on the issue at hand, as the Post's other blogs have not experienced similar problems." What kind of precedent does this set for other mainstream news sites? What we'd consider a normal day around here has to look fairly intimidating to the average newspaper editor. Will this dissuade news sites from blogging in the future?

3 of 347 comments (clear)

Obligatory PA strip by Rob+T+Firefly · 2006-01-20 09:12 · Score: 5, Funny

The maths involved are surprisingly straightforward.

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Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Will this dissuade news sites from blogging... by John+Hasler · 2006-01-20 09:12 · Score: 4, Funny

We can only hope.

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Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Which web has he been browsing? by Logic+Bomb · 2006-01-20 09:23 · Score: 3, Funny

The article quotes the executive editor of the paper's website:
"Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture"

I'm sorry, you must be new here. Reasoned debate?!?!