A new year’s resolution we can share

How are your new year’s resolutions holding up? This is right about the time when we might need to be reminded of the grand promises we made to ourselves and loved ones. So are you sticking to that well-intentioned plan to get more exercise and adjust your diet? OK, you don’t have to answer that question.

But we do want to let you know we are in that process of evaluating our own new year’s resolutions to you, our community, as well as promises that we are trying to keep up on some realistic goals for ourselves as an understaffed and underfunded newsroom that struggles to do its best. 

We want you to know that we always strive to enlighten and inform you in our news and community coverage, and to approach the big challenges to the Island with a spirit of fairness and accuracy. We don’t always succeed, but we want to assure you that we are always trying our best. 

The new year started off with an extraordinary challenge in this regard. As you have no doubt been reading in our news coverage, a spate of tragic deaths took the lives of five prominent leaders from very different corners of the Island, and it has challenged us as a newsroom to do our best. Our coverage was not perfect, not by a long shot. But we have tried to honor these lives lost, and we hope our efforts offer a way to bind us all together around the facts of what happened and the stories around what made these lives special. 

We want to be sure we do that every time we write an obituary –– not only after a sudden and tragic death and not only about well-known or prominent people, but also about the losses that happen in families across the Island every day. A loss that may go unnoticed by the public is still powerfully important to the family impacted by that loss. We will keep trying to write these stories and to record these deaths, and to understand that is a public service we provide as a community news organization. The service is to honor those in our community who pass away by sharing their story. We recognize that this part of our job is particularly in demand by communities when they feel gutted by tragedy, and the Island certainly does seem to be reeling from a gut punch. Actually, a series of gut punches, one blow after another. We are left struggling to catch our breath.

But the even harder part of our job, and the area where we have focused our new year’s resolution, has to do with serving as moderators of a civil dialogue in this deeply divided time in which we live. These days seem to come with a daily pummeling that is local, national, and global and can leave us all feeling breathless and distressed. So I hope the local tragedies we have experienced can give us the perspective that we need to step back and collectively take a pause and reflect on how the relentless pace of news, misinformation, and disinformation, and the general culture of disrespectful dialogue are impacting us all. We need to vow to stop and try harder to listen to each other.

To accomplish this new year’s resolution as a news organization, to try to balance opinions and listen to each other, we need your help. This is a resolution that requires you to be committed to the same goal of improving civil dialogue on our Island. We need to see this as a shared goal.

In order to achieve a more healthy dialogue, in order to actually listen to one other and hear what we are saying, we need both a culture of respect and some appropriate guardrails. These guardrails are particularly needed around how we moderate comments, and we had some particularly nasty ones that landed at the end of last year. 

We consider this an evolving process; it began in earnest almost exactly one year ago, when we asked for input on how best to handle comments. They seem to get even nastier when they spill over to public forums like Islanders Talk on Facebook. That platform can be beneficial, for example, in highlighting a fundraiser. And it can be useful if you have lost a pet. But it is a flawed and fraught forum for dialogue on controversial issues, and ends up filled with offensive comments and hidden agendas, which all too often are anonymous — although the page’s moderators have made a recent effort to get rid of accounts belonging to people not associated with the Vineyard. Islanders Talk too quickly descends into vitriol, ad hominem attacks, and outright falsehoods. Our news organization and some of our staff have been victims of these false and defamatory attacks on Islanders Talk. We often find ourselves wondering why there is not a new online forum that could serve as an alternative to Islanders Talk, and we have a name we’d like to recommend: Islanders, Listen!

And so this is the one new year’s resolution that we believe we can all share. Let’s make a promise to ourselves and to each other to truly listen to each other.

The proposed resolution

The resolve to listen is what motivated us to reach out to you, our readers, all last year about our comment policy. After your input, for which we were grateful, as well as input from our staff and Island leaders in the faith, civil rights, nonprofit, and education communities, we developed a set of guidelines that we believe will help us ensure there is a place for free speech, free of hate and vitriol. Our new year’s resolution is to do better to live up to these guidelines, and to be sure we encourage our readers and commenters to do the same. One thing we are working on is making sure this process is easier to see on The Times website, and we are still working on that. Thanks for your patience.

For now, we thought we would put in print once again what our policies are. Of course, as part of this ongoing effort to improve our comments and step up the civility with which we discuss important issues on our webpages, we always want to hear from you. You can send suggestions directly to one of our moderators and news editors, Eunki Seonwoo. Many of you know Seonwoo as a reporter, but Eunki and fellow reporter Hayley Duffy have both stepped up into the role of news editors, and they are doing a great job. Seonwoo is handling the comments, while Duffy is on point to help us publish “The Minute” every day. The Times approaches moderating comments as a team effort, and we all want to be sure we make clear to the community what exactly our policies for comments are, so here is the list we published in January last year:

• All comments will be submitted for review by our moderator.
• To comment, we ask that you are a paid subscriber to The Times, or as we call it a member, and we are setting a limit of one post per member, per day.
• Comments will be capped at 200 words.
• Verifiable names and email addresses are required to post.
• All comments will need to be grounded in the matter at hand, pertaining to the story the member wishes to comment on.
• There should be absolutely no threats of violence, and we will not tolerate ad hominem attacks or profanity. 
• There will be no attacking or criticism of someone for their race, sexual orientation, religion, or gender. Differences of opinion on matters of politics, policy, or approaches to big Island issues, including housing, climate change, immigration, and education, will have to be civil and thoughtful to be posted.
• We are implementing a three-strike policy for commenters who violate these rules. If a poster insistently strikes a tone of disrespect or incivility, or attacks others, he or she will be banned after three warnings.
• Comments will be shut down on each story after seven days, as has been the policy for many years.
• If you want to make a comment that is longer than 200 words, or if you are not a subscriber, please feel free to write a letter to the editor. You can do so via email at editor@mvtimes.com, and we will review it for publication. 

You can also mail us a letter via the Postal Service: MV Times, Letter to the Editor, 30 Beach Road, P.O. Box 518, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568.

If you wish to reach Eunki Seonwoo directly, email him at eunki@mvtimes.com, or call 508-693-6100, ext. 118.