My brother the journalist often gripes about the crackpots that leave comments on the online version of his newspaper. He says it’s an enormous pain in the ass to have to monitor the neo-Nazi rants at the end of each newspaper article. Similar sentiments at Gawker.
While you’re there, you must check out how they age McCain and Obama. I’m loving Gawker lately.
Apt. 11d 
As usual, the MSM is very late to the party. The estimable Teresa Nielsen Hayden sums it up in her very first guideline on conversations in virtual spaces:
(emphasis added) Are the newspaper authors ever present in comments? Is anyone at all from the paper present? Should anyone be surprised that comments are therefore a festering swamp?
Honestly, this is not rocket science. It’s not even as hard as reporting. It is, however, time-consuming, and it has to be done by real humans, which the papers are unwilling to employ. That’s why I don’t think newspaper comment sections are going to get any better.
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I agree, until the newspapers invest some employees, the comment section won’t be a forum for thoughtful ideas, but a slam fest.
Our local paper is so negligent, it’s obscene. There is a band of frequent posters who belittle and twist every story- usually blaming immigrants and “liberal” criminals. The dead are maligned, and the most innocent story is a shouting match.
Yet I know the paper won’t moderate the ocmment section, or even just close it down- like it should- because the hits they get translate into advertising dollars. Just like if it bleeds it leads; if it has an hate filled oomment section, it pays.
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No need.
There are already tons of companies that are looking to build technology so that well written articles in Puduka make it to Park Avenue. Check out Brad Felds’s post here on glue and comments:
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2008/07/glue_and_commen.html
As always Laura, your timing is perfect.
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Interesting idea kip, but will it scale past 46? Threads at very chatty places like Unfogged and Making Light regularly have several hundred.
Also, the problem with newspaper comments is not the dearth of comments, it’s the tsunami. Almost all of them talking past each other. To get a conversation going, you need more than that, and ya need some way to separate the wheat from the chaff in comments. I think that last is what the AI people call a hard problem.
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Maybe newspapers should put an ad in Craigslist to see if they can’t find some help. That’s how I find stuff now.
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@Doug: Indeed it is a very hard problem to sow and tag them together to find a reasonable discussion. Blogging companies are working on making sure you can have a hello Kitty background and get paid for hosting. I think this opens up some cool possibilities for companies that can help bloggers and papers manage wheat gets put there. There are 2 aspects here:
1. It’s up to the posters to correctly reflect or post with regard to the thread that they are talking about. If you post on the wrong topic then the fault is the user’s. Most don;t have a nice UI and it makes this sort of thing a common occurrence which sucks as it is hard to read. Using @’s is not the solution. 2. Not all comments are the same and some may just be all and all bull. Allowing users to up the value of certain comments as well as to see the history or cred of the commenter is also something that is a very cool function of this web app. As a blogger you can see who the commenters are as well as assess the comment to post ratio to see what generates discussion of your audience. Again there could be some skewing here but there is no way to properly sort through the data to get outliers in traditional companies.
Check out the intense debate website and watch the demo movie that they have. I’m sure any of the people there can answer the questions that you have. http://www.intensedebate.com/
I’m going to add this to my project blog soon and will let you know how this works out.
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