Every now and then, students and aspiring journalists write to me for advice about entering the field. Here’s an email I sent recently, published with permission.
Today’s question is incredibly brief in order to cut out personal details.
Dear Lauren, I was personally attacked in the comments of an article I wrote. Has this ever happened to you?
Show me an online reporter who hasn’t gotten less-than-kind comments on an article, and I’ll show you a liar. Since the Internet allows commenters to get away with criticism, bullying, and even death threats with total impunity, mean comments are pervasive and they’re not going away anytime soon.
And it’s not just that mean comments are easy to leave on an article. People wouldn’t post them if they weren’t effective. Sure, everyone says “don’t feed the trolls,” but the reason it’s so hard NOT to is because they actually do get under your skin.
So long story short, I’ve faced plenty of personal attacks in the comments section. Here’s a good example. Plenty of the comments on this article question my ability as a journalist or writer and accuse me of taking sides. At one time, I would have been ashamed to share this. But it’s easier when I realize these comments were written with the exacting purpose of figuring out which phrasing would hurt me the most.
Sometimes mean comments are a good thing. When you get a lot of mean comments saying the same thing, it hurts, but it can help you realize ways to improve. For example, since a lot of those comments accused me of taking a side, it forced me to evaluate whether I truly did my best reporting the story honestly. (Though I would have preferred some kinder constructive criticism to come to that conclusion!)
But most of the time, they’re not helpful at all. I’ll never forget the barrage of comments I got to my site from 4chan after I dared to write about Pokémon fan art for Kotaku. I was an intern at the time, and my story could have used a bit more work, but I don’t know why anybody thought that calling me “ugly as a dog” would make me a better reporter.
So, there’s my answer. But I’m guessing you had a followup question to this. Something like, “So what do you do when you get personally attacked in the comments of your own article?”
Most of the time? Nothing. If it’s against the commenting policy of the outlet you work for, an editor might delete it. Or comment that it’s an “unhelpful” comment and link to the commenting policy. If it’s on your own blog, keep it or delete it, whichever is most comfortable for you. And put a comment policy in place for next time.
In very rare cases, you should reply, but only when the commenter has legitimate criticism that they’ve presented more cruelly than they might have intended. If they say, “X is wrong, asshole!” and X really is wrong, you can let them know you’ve updated the story. Nothing more, nothing less. It might even remind the commenter that there’s a person writing that article and to be less brusque next time.
One last thing to think about—you’re never alone. That personal attack was intended for you as the writer, but since it’s public, other readers can see it too. Unless you get into an ill-advised flamewar (please don’t), that solitary mean statement just makes the commenter look like a bully. You don’t need to call them out to know other people are looking at it and shaking their heads at how awful the Internet has become.
Don’t doubt yourself, and just keep putting yourself out there. It’d be pretty silly to let one troll commenter or two make you quit your journalism career. I’m rooting for you!
Do you have a question you’d like to ask? Drop me an email or visit my Tumblr Ask box.
(Homestuck troll papercraft by ~kittyintheraiyn. Couldn’t resist.)
6 Comments.
In middle school/high school I was an absolute flame baiter/flame warrior, and I still have in me the unfortunate personality flaw that I really, really want to respond to these kinds of comments (and more innocuous ones that are just people being know-it-alls rather than outright mean).
I’ve started thinking about how I could learn to be better about this. I recently was reading about the work of Paul Meehl on how applying extremely simple rules has helped clinicians become better at their job just by virtue of helping them become more consistent.
I started thinking, maybe I could ask myself three simple questions whenever I’m tempted to respond to a comment. Something like:
“Is the substance of this comment relevant?”
“How much of this comment is a personal attack?”
“Does this comment bring up anything that I didn’t encounter when I was working on the piece?”
Using Meehl’s method, you would assign a score of, say, 1-5 (5 being very relevant, no personal attack at all, and very new info to you, respectively) to each question, and then add the score up. If the total is 9 or less, ignore the comment entirely.
I feel like having a procedure like this to fall back on would be a good barrier to letting oneself get sucked into pointless comment arguments.
What do you think?
@Adam, I think this is actually pretty sound. I think a lot of people fall into the “haters gonna hate” mentality and ignore/delete ALL comments that aren’t 100% nice. As a result, they don’t learn anything. Nobody likes getting criticized, but it’s important to remember you’re not in a vacuum and you’re not infallible.
I really hate defending myself in the comments, even if I think I’m right, but one thing that’s been helping break this habit is that my contract with ReadWrite explicitly says I need to participate in the comments when it’s relevant. If you look at my Disqus history, you can see how that’s going.
Meanwhile, John is more like you and enjoys participating in debates in the comments. I always say, “Why? You’ll never convince your opponent!” and he says, “I’m not trying to. I am trying to convince other commenters watching the debate.”
Oh yeah, if you are contractually bound to engage in the comments, then I definitely recommend something like I outlined above (tweaked to whatever you think is relevant/to sort for whatever kind of commenter is least likely to make you pull out your hair). The main downside I’d say for the system is that if you don’t have to engage in the comments, “ignore by default” is probably the best possible mental setting, haha.
I gave up on persuasion as a goal a long time ago (of people I’m arguing with or even the people watching) and try to engage only when I think that I will personally gain something from it (like a correction, or an interesting new perspective, or a better explanation for a point of view I knew existed but wasn’t sure why anyone bought into).
Usually I do this by ignoring comments and just trying to pick blogs and people on social media that make me think/open my mind. But I have a dual opposing worries about this:
-What if I’m filtering out people who challenge my point of view without realizing it?
But then
-What if by engaging people who heatedly disagree with me, I just reinforce my existing beliefs because I feel they are threatened and so dig in?
There are plenty of studies that show both tendencies, and not many studies that indicate what strategies for resisting them are effective. I like to think that I’m a lot better about exposing myself to reasonable people that disagree with me in an uninsulting way than I used to be, but I wonder if everyone thinks of themselves that way and I’m just deluding myself.
I disagree on a fundamental level with simply ignoeing non constructive, evil comments. The internet is a second life for a lot of people. We have a right irl to not be bullied and abused as well as an obligation to confront those people. I used to get offended by internet comments. Then I ignored them. Then I thought of batman. What chance does the internet have if good people do nothing. We have generated a culture (by ignoring) of hate where it is acceptable to be harmful because that’s how it is.
I don’t accept this.
@Peter, sorry for the late reply. I think there are two ways of using the internet. 1) as a no rules playground and 2) as a place to get community we couldn’t find locally. It’s where those two – the pranksters and those making themselves vulnerable – intersect that we get this problem. I feel like internet comments come from thing 1 and content comes from thing 2. So a lot of times, when you engage with commenters, it never even seems real to them.
The Internet is just like high school, if you ask me. I do agree that if the feedback is constructive, then it’s worth it to reply back.
Otherwise, just ignore/delete it. I do think we have to find ourselves in the grey area more. There was an article I read on content personalization and how it affects the psyche for better and for worse.
I do think most Internet arguments just end with “let’s agree to disagree.”