Online comments: racist, idiotic completely useless...and bad for journalism

When I was at my previous shop, I would oppose allowing online comments on stories every chance I'd get.

Of course, I also opposed having reporters or editors shoot video too, but that's another story.

Online comments are the bane of a good newspaper's existence.

 

FIRST!

 

Always funny.

 

Tell it to the sellers of Kleenex, hand lotion and bedsheets.

 

I agree. The whole thing was a misguided attempt to stir website traffic.

On one hand, management likes to boast about how many people are on their website. And the thing that drives that is controversy. Nothing like dropping a few F-bombs to get the blood boiling, no matter what the topic. What I've seen, however, is that the "conversation" quickly devolves into a pissing match between two or three people and the rest tune out. (Sort of like some threads around here.) Is that helping the paper or anyone else?

Ditch the whole comments section.

 

I wrote a story about a local kid who died and when I was working on a follow-up, I couldn't get people to talk to me because of hateful comments on the original story. So yeah, not a big fan of them right now.

 

Online comments are terribly destructive to the newspaper's brand. I can't believe that there are people who would argue otherwise.

 

I really hate when I read a story or column that references a reader's comment on a previous story and I've been seeing that more often lately.

 

I can't believe that so many newspapers are pandering to the lowest common denominator like they are with these user comments.

Great, the newspaper's Web site gets a lot of hits, and still aren't making a profit. Meanwhile, how can I take my company serious about wanted to engage readers with compelling stories and draw in new readers and embrace diversity when almost every reader comment I see on our site looks like it could have been written by the Klan. I hope they're proud of their interaction with our "public."

 

A politician signed up on our Web site and ranted about other state representatives in the comments section. We caught him and got a good story out of it. That's the only good thing comments have done for my rag.

 

Stories have comments the same reason blogs do - to create a more social site and make sure it is the place to go to for everything. Granted, moderating comments can be a pain in the ass (and most places from what I've seen don't have a great system) and not everyone is going to provide a useful discourse, but you have to take the good with the bad in all walks of life.

 

The days of one-way media are over. Musicians release masters so that fans can remix their work. Movies engage people with alternate reality games. Newspapers do comments on the Web.

If you wanted one-sided communication, you wouldn't be on the Internet.

Now that doesn't mean there aren't problems with the current system. If your paper is doing comments purely for page hits, you'll probably get nothing but trash. Engagement is a must. Moderating these forums takes work and possibly manpower that newspapers no longer have. However, labeling all comments and commentors as terrible simply because you've had bad experiences won't solve a thing. I'd recommend trying to use the tool for something positive.