Comments on news sites, blessing and curse
Jack Lail, managing editor/multimedia at The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, wrote a comprehensive post about allowing online comments on newspaper Web sites. It’s an excellent treatment of the topic and well worth reading for both journalists and journalism students.
Commenting and comment management systems will evolve for newspaper Web sites. We’re at 1.0 versions for managing large-scale commenting. Some very large blogs also don’t have comments either, for these very same management issues. If we were Microsoft, we’d begin to get something useful by version 3.0.
The best of comments are often better than the stories, but under the bridges live the Trolls, the unhappy, the hateful, the racist and the sexist.
There are 62 comments on Jack’s post!
This is an old argument, and one that makes me feel a bit tired when it rises up again (and again), but it is important nonetheless.
Comments are messy, demanding, problematic. So are most children. That doesn’t mean the solution is to get rid of them.
I can’t believe our industry is still hung up on comments. That’s like arguing about whether or not to post everything to the Web (oh wait, Philly Inquirer …).
Let’s get over ourselves and move on already!
August 12, 2008 at 1:21 pm