Washington Post Shuts Down Blog

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?

Comments

Cache of all the original comments

[urine]

The thoroughly nonpartisan *cough!* democratic underground has a cache of all the original comments before the board was shut down. Frankly, it looks to me like the Washington Post's omsbusdman (woman) got her panties in a knit not over harsh comments, but over her unwillingness to respond to substantiative errors in her post.