by P.D. Lesko

On February 18, 2020 MLive’s Vice President of Content, John Hiner wrote, “I’m writing today to announce a significant change to the MLive.com website experience: At 6 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, we will permanently close the comment sections on our articles.”

Hiner in his editorial goes on to complain how hard it is for the company’s postage-stamp sized staff, working along with a “vendor” MLive hires, to moderate the comments. They “devolve.” They become “nasty” and “uncivil.” In large part, this happened because people, including long-time members of city boards and commissions, as well as former Council members, hid behind screen names such as “Unicorn Princess.”

In 2014, current Ward 4 City Council candidate Jen Eyer—who was then employed by MLive as the State Community Engagement Director— did a Tedx talk in which she claimed, “this real name thing isn’t working” in newspaper comment sections. In her talk, Eyer says the way to bring civility to online comments is to “Govern. Engage. Evolve.” If the Ann Arbor News comment section is a rabid dog that needs to be put down, as Hiner argues, Jen Eyer can be thought of the dog owner who talked up the rabies vaccine for the sake of her own career even as the animal exhibited clear signs of sickness.

The cesspool that is the Ann Arbor News’s commenting is a monster of the newspaper’s own making. Rather than require commenters use their real names via Facebook comments, as do The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press, or rigorously moderate comments according to its own guidelines, the company is turning them off.

Hiner, in a December 2019 email to a local man who’d complained that he was being libeled in MLive comments— comments which clearly violated the newspaper’s own commenting guidelines—promised an “internal review.” Hiner flatly refused to share the results of the review with the reader. Hiner then told the reader he was free to “police” MLive comments for mention of his name and use the paper’s “flag system.” The reader responded: “No matter how it might be presented to readers, the ‘flag button’ is not even a minimal solution to the problem of people being personally attacked, maligned and libeled in the comments.” 

Hiner, in an effort to keep pesky commenters from posting feedback about his own letters from the editor, turned off commenting.

When readers accused Hiner of hypocrisy, he responded thusly: “This column is a conversation with readers, about a specific topic or concern. Opening comments would be an invitation for it to go off-track in unpredictable ways, not relevant to the discussion I’m trying to have. And then I’d finish like this: ‘This approach seems to be working – we’re having a civil conversation now.’”

In 2019, I had a lengthy email exchange with Hiner. I asked why, after my Council member had brought to the company’s attention allegedly unethical conduct on the part of the Ann Arbor News’s politics reporter Ryan Stanton and his boss Kelly Frick, my Council member had been threatened by Stanton’s boss, Frick. I also wanted to know why my elected official was banned from the MLive comment section, which was a clear violation of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics.

In my email to Hiner I wrote:

1. CM Hayner asked a member of the Executive Team of a news organization owned by Advance, why its reporter sent inappropriate text messages to him. [Stanton has done this to other elected officials who have not contacted MLive.] [No answer.]
2. In his emails to Ms. Frick, CM Hayner asked why, days before a primary election, the reporter chose to publish, and misattribute to the then- candidate, content from a “database” of invented, Photoshopped Tweets provided the reporter by an unnamed source who, the Council member reasonably concludes, wished to influence the primary election. [No answer.] [Journalistic codes of ethics strongly urge the use of primary sources and for obvious reasons strongly discourage anonymous source materials.]
3. CM Hayner asked Frick to explain why her reporter pretended to readers that vulgar, invented, fake Tweets were primary source materials attributed to the then-candidate. [No answer.]
4. CM Hayner asked why Frick’s reporter has, over the past several months, repeatedly misquoted him, including via omission. [Frick dismissed this as unfounded.] 
5. CM Hayner asked why Frick’s reporter continually passes off invented, non-primary-sourced comments as reported speech obtained from the Council member. [No answer.]
6. CM Hayner asked why Frick’s reporter forwarded a threatening, slanderous voicemail to former MLive executive Jennifer Eyer (a third party). Eyer then forwarded the message to Mr. Hayner’s wife’s cell phone. [No answer.] 

I wrote to Hiner, “Frick and her supervisor must, as transparently as possible, investigate the reporter’s text messages sent to all of the Council members with whom he has been inappropriate, and explain to our community in an open editorial. Our community must be informed of all discoveries of bias and/or targeting of elected officials with whom the reporter admitted he was angry and with whom he admitted conflicts and grudges in text messages to elected officials.”

To his credit, Hiner launched an “investigation.” To no one’s surprise, both Stanton and Frick were found to have done nothing wrong. CM Hayner, however, was permitted to comment on MLive’s articles again, and did so. My commenting account, however, was suspended days after Hiner sent his email in which he’d vindicated his employees’ journalistically unethical and dishonest behavior.

Hiner in his Feb. 18, 2020 editorial writes that closing the newspaper’s comment section will allow the comment moderators to create, “more news content – something you often tell me you’d value more on our site.” Actually, what Hiner wrote in a previous editorial is that Ann Arbor readers expressed to him that they wanted more local news content.

Under its current leadership and in its current iteration, I believe that the Ann Arbor News is a detriment to our community and to democracy. The local politics reporting is incurious, sloppy and often one-sided, favoring the fantasies of the local Industrial Green Complex, monied interests and the local politicians who do the bidding of both. Reporter Ryan Stanton frequently neglects to write about the comments and work of the Council members with whom he exchanged those inappropriate text messages I referred to above, and Council members who have been critical of MLive’s reporting.

In the four years I had my MLive commenting account, I posted around 400 comments. Hiner admitted that just “2,340 commenters account for more than 60 percent of all comments posted to MLive’s website.” This meant that local political gadflies, such as former Ward 4 City Council candidate Jaime Magiera, (whose MLive profile showed he’d posted over 13,000 comments) would dominate conversations incessantly. Hiner referred to commenters such as Magiera as the “loudest and most frequent voices.”

The Ann Arbor News’s leadership is showing just how desperate MLive and its out-of-state owner actually are. A 2016 study titled “Commenting on the News: Explaining the degree and quality of user comments on news websites,” published in Journalism Studies revealed, “…[R]ecent studies show that about 24% of the U.S. citizens comment on news articles at least once a week (Newman et al., 2017). Reading user comments is even more widespread (Ksiazek, 2016); almost 50% of Americans have read user comments on news articles at some point.”

John Hiner has seen the Ann Arbor News’s print readership plummet from 60,000 in 2006 to under 16,000 in 2019. In 2013, Dan Gaydou was reported (http://www.annarbor.com/news/annarborcom-moving-to-mlivecom-on-sept-12/) as saying that MLive.com reached 4 million online users per month. Hiner claims in his 2020 editorial MLive reaches “10 million” online users per month. Online traffic analysis sites estimate MLive actually reaches 1.9 million online users per month.

Hiner’s reasoning in his editorial in support of shutting down the paper’s commenting is ridiculous: “Thanks for reading, and staying engaged in our journalism. The elimination of comment sections doesn’t end that, it just channels it in a more civil and constructive way.” Now, with readers having no opportunity comment, Hiner writes in his February 20, 2020 editorial that he is confident MLive will have “meaningful conversations with everyone.” Really?

What may actually be behind MLive’s pulling the plug on its commenting sections is the paper’s own richly-deserved poor reputation, and the management team’s inept efforts to stop the newspaper’s skid toward irrelevance.

NeimanLab published an article in January of 2019 titled, “It doesn’t take a ton of nasty comments to sink a reader’s perception of a news site.” In that piece, author Christine Schmidt writes, “Researchers at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas found that uncivil comments on news stories can cloud a visitor’s perspective of a news site.” Those researchers concluded: “…that incivility in comment sections can influence how people perceive a news organization’s brand — which is key to attracting an audience.”

As one reader emailed to John Hiner, “In many quarters of this city, MLive is considered, figuratively, to be a joke.” The reader went on to write,
“Recently, it [MLive] was literally the butt of an actual joke before an audience of about 1200 at the Michigan Theater. The event was one of the U-M Art and Design School’s weekly series of presentations.  It took place about the time of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the city buying the theater.  The director of the series noted Ryan Stanton’s story about the anniversary.  She said, ‘Imagine, in MLive, a real story by a real reporter!'”

Ed Kubosiak, Vice President of Content for MassLive, a sister online newsite to MLive, and owned by Advance, made a similar announcement that commenting would end on Thursday February 20, 2020.

One anonymous MassLive reader responded: “If community engagement is a critical part of your mission you wouldn’t be disabling the comments. It is quite obvious this is being done to maintain the narrative this ‘news’ source spews. But I suppose it must be tough seeing all the comments on the constant misspellings , the lack of your site’s actual journalism and seeing that people are buying your one sided opinion.”

One anonymous MLive.com reader wrote: “I am against one-way news correspondence from news providers. You can’t roll back the clock and change the way society interacts with its news. And, to be fair, shutting down comments will not refocus visitors to your site on the ‘product.'”

In August of 2019, I wrote to John Hiner: “Newspapers are guests in their communities, and only have influence thanks to the trust of communities in which the papers do business. The Advance product in Ann Arbor—which is increasingly viewed as a self-serving leach and dubbed ‘MLies’ in its own comment section, could be driven from this marketplace.”

In response to Hiner’s announcement, one Ann Arbor City Council member said, “All the lies and zero feedback.”

MLive is shutting down comments from readers? I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Since 2009, the Ann Arbor News has been a boorish, greedy, self-serving guest in our house. I see this announcement as nothing but great news.