How the Washington Post is Ruining its Brand Online

Note: Please be aware that this post contains some disturbing quotes to make its point.

What on earth is wrong with the Washington Post.

The Washington Post is one of the oldest newspapers in the U.S. and one of the most important because it’s read by D.C.’s powerbrokers. It’s famous for numerous stories from the Spanish-American war to Watergate.

The Post is allowing decades of its reputation to be destroyed online. Their site has already been in trouble for posting spurious chain-emails as facts, but it seems as if they’re sinking even lower at the moment.

Post Articles are Cess Pools

This article has around 3000 comments. Their technical staff should certainly break those into different pages so I don’t need to load each and every one, but the lack of any moderation is shocking. I’d estimate that 9 out of every 10 comments should not have been published. Here are some examples of those the Post should not have published. The crazy things is that these are far from the worst examples … many others were simply too crude or abusive to repost here.

1) Blatant Trolling (Racism in this case)

racist

2) Posting Only Self-Promotional Links

links

3) Copying and Pasting Large Chunks of Text

bills

4) So Far Beyond Inappropriate Its Hard to Know Where to Start

picture

 

I counted this image posted at least a dozen times.

Finally Someone Calls the Post Out

sensible

The sad fact is that nearly all the Post’s blogs are defaced in this way. How can a prestigious organization get it so very wrong?

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