Introducing Emails to the Editor, the new way to share your comments

From its earliest days, Greater Greater Washington has created opportunities to share ideas and learn from each other.

Connections forged through GGWash, online and in-person, have led to changes across our region: more housing, more affordable housing, better land use, and improved multimodal transportation. At the heart of our work is bringing people together to pursue these shared goals.

Over the fourteen years since our founding, how people engage with each other has evolved. In virtual spaces, dialogue takes place more and more on third-party social media platforms. As that change took place, the level of productive dialogue in our comments section declined, reflecting an ever-smaller slice of the perspectives held by the hundreds of thousands of people who visit our website each month. Too often, as we’ve noted for years, it devolved into expressions of racism, sexism, or otherwise hateful rhetoric. The challenging, at times emotionally draining, work involved in effectively moderating the comments section isn’t a good use of our editorial team’s capacity, and outstrips what is fair to expect from volunteers. We aim to create an inclusive, welcoming space for engagement, and take seriously our responsibility not to platform hostile behavior.

We’d like to focus those precious resources of effort and time on approaches that engage more people and are more inclusive of the breadth of perspectives that make up our readership. This includes, for example, offering webinars inspired by stories we publish and hosting regular in-person meet-ups around the region. (If you have other suggestions about how we can provide meaningful opportunities for engagement, feel free to reach out to me at callinger[at]ggwash.org.)

In light of this changing context and our priorities as an organization, we’ve decided to close the comments section on GGWash. We’re transitioning to an Emails to the Editor form of engagement on news/analysis, opinion, and policy pieces (identifiable by the gray labels at the tops of stories). We’ll periodically publish a selection of Emails to the Editor that we receive. This will help to channel the best of what had been the comments section into a new format that will reach a larger number of people. (Note: There is still space for commenting on our posts on Facebook and Twitter.)

Click here to read more about Emails to the Editor.

The GGWash comments section has outlasted its counterparts on many other sites by years, and that is a testament to the community of people that surround this organization. We’re grateful for the many people who have used it as a space in which to share thoughtful reflections, and hope to see many of them transition those comments into Emails to the Editor.

I’d also like to extend my deepest thanks to the GGWash staff and volunteers, present and past, who have dedicated countless hours to the work of comments section moderation. While that work has often been invisible to the outside world, it’s the reason that space could be sustained for this long. It has had a positive impact that extends beyond that little space on our screens at the bottom of articles.

Closing the comments section feels like the end of an era. It is. We don’t take this step lightly, but we know it’s necessary to move forward into a future that builds on the best of our past.