Adding Opinions to Coastsider?

posted by Barry Parr on Mar 24, 2004 at 02:53 pm in  About Coastsider
3 comments • Click to email this story

Here’s a question for beta testers and early adopters.

I’m trying to decide how to deal with opinion pieces (versus purely factual items) on Coastsider. I’m considering two alternatives, but there may be more. The first is to create a separate section called Opinions, where all opinion pieces would reside. The second is to put them in the most appropriate section (Business, Community, Fun, Government).

In either case, opinion pieces should have an Opinion tag in the title (e.g. “Opinion: Secret meetings are good for the community"). I can see several types of opinion tags: Opinion, Coastsider Editorial, Column. Can anybody think of others?

Comments

Comment 1 by Jonathan Lundell  on  Mar 31  at  7:33pm  •  All my comments • 

WRT your two options, why not both, if the software supports it? Maybe not ideal for RSS, unless one of the copies could be suppressed, but some blog software has provision for filing an article in different places (chronologically, by topic, etc).

(Secret meetings are bad for the community. They deprive us of our circuses.)

Comment 2 by Stephen Miller  on  Aug 30  at  1:42pm  •  All my comments • 

Who determines what is opinion and what is fact? Is it simply a matter of how the blogger labels the submission? Is Moore’s “F911” a documentary or is it propaganda? Are there well-defined criteria for when something posted on coastsiders is editorial and when it is news analysis? Who is the arbiter? Just wondering…

Comment 3 by Barry Parr  on  Aug 30  at  1:54pm  •  All my comments • 

That would be me.

I’d use the Potter Stewart standard: “I know it when I see it.”

Seriously, my goal would be to get posters to either write their postings as either reporting or opinion. Opinions should be fact-based, but are intended to be persuasive, not analytical. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is opinion. “Fog of War” is harder to define. It’s an interview, but it clearly has a point of view.


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