[Boston-editorial] feature on Gentrification in JP

[Matthew Williams]

Hello all --

I'm writing because I'm concerned about the most recent posting Pete 
centered: http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/34778/index.php	

One concern is that it's just an announcement--as one reader complains, 
there's not really a lot of context. If it were an announcement with 
more information, I would be cool with centering it, but as it is now, 
it's not a news article and it's not commentary. I think we've agreed 
in the past we don't want to center announcements because that involves 
picking and choosing which campaigns to support.

If that was the only issue, I probably wouldn't be posting this though.

My bigger issue is that we've centered something that includes 
someone's home phone number and urges people to call him. Yes, it urges 
people to be cordial, but we know perfectly well plenty of people won't 
be cordial. It's one thing if this sort of announcement is in the 
newswire--it's another if it's in the features column, which at least 
implies we support such actions. I have no interest in getting into a 
debate if such actions are appropriate, but I'm concerned about what 
the possible consequences are if it seems like we're endorsing a call 
to action which might result in someone being verbally harassed. Is 
that really a position we want to put ourselves in?

I'd also point out  that when people have posted Flipside's personal 
information in the past, we've hidden it. The situation is somewhat 
dangerous, since the developer represents a threat to the community and 
Flipside is a relatively harmless (if annoying) crank, but still I 
would think that indicates we agree that we're not eager to publish 
people's personal information without their permission, regardless of 
what we think of them.

-- Matt