We posted new “terms of service” this week for MonroeTalks.com, our social networking Web site.
They aren’t much different from the original terms, which have been used since the site debuted last June. The biggest difference is that they’re shorter and easier to read — more written for regular folks than for lawyers.
Our basic principle remains the same: This is the community’s Web site, and we want the users to moderate themselves.
There are now more than 2,000 people registered to use MonroeTalks.com, and about 500 of them are regular talkers. In addition, thousands more visit the site every day to check out the conversation — totaling more than 1 million page views a month.
We’ve had exceptional good luck for the first nine months of MonroeTalks.com. Use of the site has grown dramatically and continues on a steady upward curve. And while there have been a few incidents, for the most part the users have been responsible in their posts on the site.
Before rewriting the terms of service, we asked users of MonroeTalks.com for their suggestions. There were many good comments and several were used in the final version.
Most of the discussion involved how aggressively we should moderate the forums.
As on all Internet talk forums, it’s easy for discussions to veer off the topic. One person changes the subject, or flirts a little, or gets personal in an attack on another user. Before you know it, there have been pages of comments that don’t resemble the original topic.
The problem is obvious. If you were drawn to a topic such as “Should Michigan have another primary,” or “What can I do to fight the gas prices,” you don’t want to have to dig through Sam and Suzie flirting online or Joe and Pete insulting each other to get to the next serious post.
On the other hand, that’s part of what an open discussion forum is all about. It’s a lot like the talk at dinner during the holidays, when there are lots of cousins and nieces and uncles gathered around the table. Good luck trying to keep the conversation on track.
We did decide to add a rule that says, “Try to keep your posts on topic as much as possible.” But you can’t make a rule against twists and turns in a conversation. Sometimes one thing makes you think of another, and then another, and the new direction may be better than the old one.
Others wanted us to get more specific in defining what is in good taste and what violates community standards of decency.
Sorry, but it’s not possible to provide a distinct definition. The Supreme Court can’t do it; what makes folks think we can. This is how the rule reads, and it’s the best we can do:
“Please be responsible. Self-moderate, remembering that this is a family Web site. Don’t post content you wouldn’t want your 13-year-old child or your mother to view. That includes profanity, nudity and lewdness.”
Some people wanted us to add a chat room, or a separate category for socializing. We considered it. But it seemed obvious that wouldn’t stop people from socializing while commenting on any topic. And that’s part of the value of an open community forum — everyone can join in the fun.
There seemed to be a clear majority who like MonroeTalks.com basically the way it is. We agree. That’s why the changes are more in readability than in substance.
My favorite line on the MonroeTalks.com conversation came from “the nosh.” His suggestion: “Dan, go back to your desk…” In other words, leave us alone to moderate ourselves.
Nosh, that’s my preference, too. I hope the new terms of service will help.

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Here are the rules for posting, taken from the terms of service:

• Please be responsible. Self-moderate, remembering that this is a family Web site. Don’t post content you wouldn’t want your 13-year-old child or your mother to view. That includes profanity, nudity and lewdness.
• Any content you post on MonroeTalks.com must be your original work, or you must have authorization from the copyright owner. Do not attempt to impersonate another individual.
• Do not post content that defames or invades the privacy of an individual. Keep your disagreements civil. No harassing or intimidating others. Disagree with another person’s views – don’t attack the person.
• Keep your ranting to a minimum. Take a deep breath, count to 10.
• Try to keep your posts on topic as much as possible.
• Content that promotes racism, bigotry, homophobia, hatred or physical harm to any group or individual will not be tolerated.

We’re looking for a few good people – maybe one, maybe several – who would be interested in helping us develop a really good parenting Web site.

We have a print publication called Monroe Parent, with a companion Web site, www.Monroeparent.com. We’re working on improvements to the print publication and want to dramatically improve the Web site, too (if you go to it now, you’ll see that it’s mostly broken, awaiting its rebirth).

There are a lot of good “Mom” or “Parenting” Web sites developing around the country, and we’d like for ours to be right there with the best. One thing it needs is a “champion” or a group of “champions” who would give it the care and nurturing it needs. These folks would lead a blog or forum discussion, surf the net for useful links to good articles and Web sites, and work with our staff to pull the best content from our print publications.

The idea is to give parents a place to exchange ideas – maybe in a slightly more orderly way than on MonroeTalks – and find good information about parenting - with a local flavor.

The “discussion leader” would need to be knowledgeable enough to pose good questions and steer the conversation, but would not have to be an expert with a degree in child development. The work could be done at home at any hour.

We’re not talking about a full-time job – just a few hours a week. We haven’t decided yet what we’ll pay, if anything. It depends on how many people show interest and how much interest and how involved they get in the site, beyond just blogging/discussion leading.

Anyone who is interested should contact me at danshaw@monroenews.com or at 734-240-5749. If you’re not sure whether you’re interested, call or e-mail me and we can talk about it.

I just returned from a visit to our nation’s capitol (okay, I never really went to the capitol, just to suburban Virginia) , where I attended a seminar on interactive community journalism.

That’s a fancy term for what we do with MonroeTalks.com, our social networking site that is designed to give area residents a place to gather in local cyberspace.

I was there to talk about MonroeTalks.com - why we did it and how we manage it. The answer to the first question is obvious - because we saw a need and decided we’d better fill it before someone else did.

People are aching to connect with others and to be part of a community. With our society changing so rapidly, there’s much less sense of community in the old-fashioned sense. People sit at their computer (or in front of their television) instead of sitting on the front porch with their neighbors.

MonroeTalks.com provides an on-line environment for hanging over the back fence with your neighbors - figuratively speaking.

It’s a very different function than what we’ve traditionally filled at the Monroe Publishing Co. But I suspect it’s only one of many we’ll fill in the future, as our media world changes.

I was struck by one comment by the seminar moderator, Mary Glick of the American Press Institute.

Some of the seminar members were questioning taking newsroom resources away from covering the “news of record” in their towns - like city or county agencies - so they could cover emerging new topics.

Mary said something like this:

“Keep in mind that in our society the locus of power is shifting away from government – to the people. A case in point: Our country is at war, but not with another government – with terrorists – a group of people.”

She didn’t continue to make the obvious next point - that the locus of “information” power also is shifting from our monolithic newspapers of yore to a very pluralistic future with many news voices.

So as journalists we’re living with two shifts – the geopolitical power shifting to the people – necessitating our re-thinking how we cover government in a democracy – at the same time the information power base is shifting to the people - any of whom can start their own blog and/or Web site.

The two shifts are most certainly related.

Anyone can report on city or county or state government on their own blog, on their own Web site. Readers have many, many potential places to look for information. That makes community activists more powerful, and it makes both government and the traditional press less powerful.

We still plan to make the Monroe Evening News the best source of local news and information for many, many years. That’s still our primary focus.

But in the meantime, www.monroenews.com and www.MonroeTalks.com, as well as www.HomesPlusMonroe.com and www.MonroeParent.com and www.Letstalktigers.com are just the beginning of the online sources of information we’ll be providing.

We’re in a race to continue to be Monroe County’s primary source of information - where ever you want to find it.

One of the most interesting things we do at a newspaper every day is selecting the lead picture for Page 1. Sometimes the choice is obvious; sometimes it’s agonizing.

Photo Editor Bryan Bosch brings the choices to the Page 1 meeting, which occurs at 7 a.m. each morning, Monday through Friday; the weekend meeting is Friday afternoon.

The point of the meeting is to decide which local, state, national and international stories should be on Page 1. The decisions often are influenced by the pictures and graphics that are available.

We often ask ourselves: Which picture would our readers prefer? Which would influence people to pick up the paper at a newsstand? Which would lead to a conversation around the water cooler?

One morning this week, we had a reader at the meeting, so we could ask the question directly.

Evening News Editor Deborah Saul has created a readers advisory panel, and new members of the group are dropping by the office to get acquainted with how we operate. One of them, Don Anspaugh, attended our daily Page 1 meeting Tuesday morning.

Bryan offered three different photos of flooding along E. Front Street. After discussing the photos, Mr. Anspaugh was given the first choice. He picked the photo above - more of a closeup of the action. Bryan, whose opinion, as photo editor, carries the most weight in these discussions, agreed. So did Stacy Sominski, the presentation editor, who also is intimately involved in the decision every morning. She’s the editor who actually designs Page 1. Sometimes how the photo relates with other elements on the page influences the choice.

While the photo they selected doesn’t give as much of an overview of the scene as the top photo, it’s more dramatic. And it doesn’t have as much action as the photo at left. But you can see the grim expressions on the faces. That’s what made the difference for me. I wasn’t at the meeting, but it would have been my choice, too.

The new readers advisory panels – so many people responded that Deb decided to have two groups – will be a valuable resource for us as we make all kinds of decisions. They’ll discuss The Evening News and how we operate at their regular monthly meetings. But even their informal visits can give us useful information.

We’re acutely aware that we’ll only succeed as a business if we’re meeting our readers’ needs.

When Evening News Editor Deborah Saul made the suggestion, it was one of those “why didn’t I think of that” moments.

I was wishing I had better information on the “MonroeTalks.com” phenomenom.

When we launched MonroeTalks.com less than a year ago, our expectations were modest. We just wanted to give Monroe County residents a place to talk on-line about topics that mattered to them - any kind of topic.

We would have considerd a few hundred people getting involved in an online conversation a success.

Less than eight months later, literally thousands of area residents are talking on MonroeTalks.com, and thousands of others are listening in (okay, viewing in).

What happened? We didn’t think it was our brilliant marketing . How did so many people get connected to MonroeTalks so quickly?

“Why don’t you ask on MonroeTalks.com,” Deb suggested.

“Good idea,” was all I could say.

Usually, a simple question is all it takes to get pages of responses on MonroeTalks.com. That’s how it works. Someone starts a topic, and anyone and everyone comments.

So I asked last Friday: “How did you hear about MonroeTalks.com and what made you start using it.”

By the end of the day Sunday, there were 50 responses. Not exactly a scientific survey, but some really good feedback.

Like most forum conversations, it got off the topic, got back on, fell off, then back on.

But in the meantime, I had 33 serious responses and some good anecdotes. The largest number of people, 13, said they started using the “Eyes and Ears” forum on the old monroenews.com and just switched over when we changed to MonroeTalks.com. Most of them said they saw the Eyes and Ears forum when they went to monroenews.com.

Another large group, 9 people, said they noticed MonroeTalks.com on the monroenews.com site and got involved that way.

The rest were spread among those who read the ads in the Monroe Evening News, 5; those who heard about the site through word-of-mouth, 4; and a couple who saw our advertisements - on a bus and on a coaster in a restaurant.

The lesson:  most people found their way to MonroeTalks through our news Web site, monroenews.com, which isn’t surprising.

An amazing number of people - 80,000 unique visitors in January - spend at least some time on monroenews.com. Since there are only about 65,000 households in Monroe County, that’s pretty much covering the market.

More and more of them are heading over to MonroeTalks.com and BlogsMonroe.com.

Throughout my journalism career, I’ve often found myself sighing out loud and muttering, “They didn’t teach about this in journalism school.”

Never has that been more frequent than the six months since we launched MonroeTalks.com, the discussion forum Web site that is getting more and more attention in Monroe County.

The site features talk, talk and more talk, on a variety of topics that is spellbinding. You name it, and it’s discussed on MonroeTalks.com. The site, just launched in mid-June, has received more than a million page views a month since October. There now are more than 1,700 people actively participating and thousands more listening in but not registered to talk.

One of the attractions, we believe, is that the site is largely not moderated. It’s a free-for-all; anyone can start a topic and anyone can participate in any discussion.

There are some rules, of course - terms of service that users agree to when they register. Things like no personal attacks on individuals, no pornography, no plagiarism of copyrighted material, etc.  

So someone, and that often is me, does have to decide occasionally whether a post on MonroeTalks.com crosses the line.

Thankfully, we don’t need to do much moderating because MonroeTalks is a very well behaved on-line community. When someone starts to cross over the line, others reel them in. At times participants  in a discussion have demanded that a poster withdraw a comment, and they’ve complied.

A few times, we’ve had to step in and delete a comment or two, or even more rarely, an entire thread.

That happened this week when a thread was started accusing state Rep. Kathy Angerer of using her influence to get charges dropped against her daughter, Megan Angerer. Some of the people commenting on the thread made further accusations or derogatory remarks about Megan.

We don’t do this often, but this seemed like a place where we should be proactive in determining the facts of the case and posting them, because the speculation was getting wilder and wilder. We did that, posting that Ms. Angerer indeed was arrested and that her case was handled the same as any other person charged with shoplifting for the first time - she was sent into a diversion program that allows her to keep her record clean if she completes a two-day program and pays restitution.

The next day a second thread began attacking Ms. Angerer again. We deleted the thread and explained why - it violated the terms of service, which prohibit personal attacks on individuals.

Naturally, another thread started discussing whether The Evening News would treat comments on MonroeTalks.com the same if they didn’t involve a public officials’ daughter.

That thread is still there, because it discusses a legitimate topic. Here’s the link. By the way, the answer to the question is that we have on several occasions deleted comments or threads because of personal attacks on individuals, and we’ll do it again when we have to. We hope it doesn’t happen often.

Dundee Dad, one of our regular posters on MonroeTalks, cut me a little slack today.  “In fairness, moderating a forum like this probably isn’t easy,” he said, on the same thread where he questioned whether we would treat anyone else the same way that we treated Ms. Angerer.

Others on the thread pointed out that we have allowed comments that are critical of businesses, as well as candidates for public office. In those cases, there was a legitimate public interest in the discussion. When a private individual who isn’t  in a public office (or running for office) is involved, a different standard applies. 

Yes, DundeeDad, it is challenging moderating a public forum. It’s also fun and fascinating, and we’re figuring out the details  as we go. Suggestions are always welcome.

We have four new bloggers joining our little corner of the blogosphere through Bedford Now, the weekly newspaper that serves Bedford Township.

The newcomers are on the home page of BedfordNow.com, but readers also can find them on the BlogsMonroe.com home page. So they’re part of the BlogsMonroe blogging community, with a Bedford twist.

Either way, they add four new perspectives that I think we’ll all enjoy.

Rebecca Regnier is the morning anchor for Channel 13 in Toledo, but she’s also a mother, wife and active member of the Bedford community. She plans to blog about issues ranging from television news to parenting. Her blog is called, “Blonde Highlights.”

Robin Dec is an attorney and a mother who writes with wit and maybe some wisdom about parenting and the busy mother lifestyle. Incidentally, she’s also Rebecca Regnier’s sister. Her blog is called “Befrazzled.”

Judy Murray is a reference librarian at the Bedford branch of the Monroe County library system. She is blogging about books, with an emphasis on sharing recommendations. Her blog is called, “Between the lines.”

David Claassen is a minister and a writer who plans to write about faith and hopes his blog stimulates conversations on spirtual matters. His blog is called “Faith Reflections.”

What happens when an old story from The Evening News that contains an error surfaces on the Internet, as can easily happen these days.

The New York Times recently laid open this troubling problem in a column by their “public editor,” Clark Hoyt, entitled, “When Bad News Follows You.” Hoyt was frank and forthcoming about the problem:

“People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up,” he said.

The example cited was a former New York City employee who is now a business consultant. When people “Google” his name, the first thing that pops up isn’t his business Web site - it’s a 20-year-old story that suggests he resigned under pressure following a scandal. In a short follow-up story days later, the Times had straightened out the misunderstanding - his leaving the city had nothing to do with the scandal. Yet what are prospective clients going to think when they see the old story?

The Times created this problem by using an aggressive search engine optimization process, which drives traffic to its Web site by pushing Times content to the top of search results on sites like Google and Yahoo.

We don’t do that at The Evening News, but the problem still exists. Either from our own archives, or from a link to another site that picked up one of our stories, it’s easy to find old stories from monroenews.com. And, just like at the Times, it’s good for us when old stories draw traffic to our Web site.

The problem faced by the Times is the volume - it would take several people working full-time to follow up on every complaint. So, as Hoyt explained, the Times is essentially doing nothing about the old errors.

It would be wrong, their editors feel, to go back and change the stories. That would be like fooling with the historical record. And besides, they couldn’t just take peoples’ word for whether a story was wrong - they would have to check on every fact that was challenged.

In many cases, the original story may not have been wrong - it’s just that circumstances have changed and the old story is misleading or confusing.

So, what are we doing about this at The Evening News. Two things.

One, we’re feeling our way along carefully, taking each case one at a time. We want to do everything we can to set the record straight, but we also want to be careful about the integrity of our archives.

Two, when we are told there is a problem with an old story, we check it out. And if we find the story is wrong, we fix it.

One thing we haven’t figured out is how to handle stories that aren’t wrong, but may be misleading because of changes in circumstances. Should we figure out a way to attach an explanation to the story in our electronic archives?

For example, a story about a conviction in our court system may be accurate. But if there was a later story about the conviction being overturned on appeal, do we have an obligation to attach the new story to the old one?

These aren’t easy issues. But we can commit to doing more than The New York Times seems to be doing.

We’ll make sure we take each complaint seriously and try to resolve it reasonably.

We didn’t really know what to expect when we launched MonroeTalks.com this week.

We expected it to be well-received, because it was based on conversations with readers and we tested it with dozens of readers before the launch. Social networking sites - which this is akin too - have been successful elsewhere on the Internet.

But we didn’t expect the overwhelming response that occurred.

More than 3,000 people visited MonroeTalks.com each of the first two days, creating more than 20,000 page views. To put that in context, we get about 5,000-6,000 visitors a day and 35,000 page views a day at our 18-month-old news site, monroenews.com. We’re pretty proud of that. Last month monroenews.com topped 1 million page views in a month - sort of a milestone for Web sites.

So you can imagine how amazed we were when in one day, with just a news story in The Evening News and a few radio ads to promote it, MonroeTalks.com was approaching the same traffic as monroenews.com

Now we’re counting the days until we top 2 million with the two sites.

If you’re on this blog, you’ve probably already been to MonroeTalks.com. If not, check it out.

A reporter for the Lousville Courier Journal was thrown out of the press box recently for blogging during the game.

The NCAA argued that by doing a play-by-play on his blog, he was violating their television contract with ESPN, which had exclusive rights to broadcast the game.

Bull-oney.

Blogging is here to stay. The NCAA and professional sports leagues need to come to terms with reality. Many commentators have pointed out that the Lousville reporter was covering a college baseball game, which isn’t exactly the most high profile sport. Does it make sense to kick a reporter out of the pressbox?

It seems to me that a double in the gap is news as soon as it occurs, and fair game for a newspaper Web site to report. If they can report it only moments later, so much the better.

At The Evening News and monroenews.com, we have plans for extensive blogging during sporting events and news events. It’s another tool in our toolbox for keeping our readers informed.

On a related sports issue, reporter Jeff Meade blogged on the Tigers’ announcers refusing to mention that Justin Verlander was working on a no-hitter (see “The Press Box” blog).

My two cents. I agree that the in-stadium announcer shouldn’t mention the pending no-hitter, because of the “jinx” superstition. But for the TV and radio announcers to avoid reporting the biggest news of the game, that’s ridiculous.

By failingto do their job, they let down many casual listeners who checked on the game mid-way but didn’t stop what they were doing and sit down in front of the TV, riveted by every pitch, because they didn’t realize a no-hitter was under way.