Excellent summary, Nancy!

1. Luckily, I have ever experienced online bullying or harassment in my private life— but as I journalist, I received angry E-mails, phone calls, fax and letters from readers and once I was attacked in a Neo-Nazi forum (some journalists in Austria joke that it is an honor to be mentioned there). For the most part, I try to ignore it, especially if it comes from extremists. But if the criticism has some truth or relevance, I try to follow up on it by talking to the people and if I made a mistake, I would of course go back and change the article accordingly.
2. In my newspaper, all comments are looked at manually, which is also part of my job and it is a lot of tiring work. If there is harassment on a frequent basis by one user, we block him or her.
3. I would encourage listening to both sides and giving both sides equal attention. Healthy, civiliced discussions are the goal, and often it becomes personal and ugly when you don’t know each other’s view point well enough. So helping the community to get closer and understand each other’s points of view is essential. This can happen by creating events like regular meetings over coffee and muffins or things like mentoring programs. We also have to remind ourselfs that if people behave like assholes, there is a reason for it, so it makes sense to do some digging and trying to understand why they behave like they do.