southtownstar.com - 339 views
Cutting our state's budget may not be as simple as we would like it to be.
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In the end, he's really saying "Just sayin'," but I think that sentiment - acknowledging the complexity of these policy debates rather than seething about one or another argument - is a good one to air publicly. Of course, the comments on the story at SouthtownStar aren't quite as as philosophical.
Yep, it's the same with the comments on Sun-Times stories, Trib to a somewhat lesser extent, etc. The reason being of course that these comments aren't moderated and it's not a community discussion, just people sounding off, often never to return. There are some exceptions of course, but they're few and far between. The reporters of course don't view it as their job to engage with the commenters, censor them if necessary, etc. And actually that's very annoying to me, because they ruin it for someone like me and the Daily Daley crew. People are so used to just spouting off and not having someone answer them, I think they're a bit bewildered when someone does and aren't prepared to engage in an actual discussion. In the end, it's unsatisfying for both writer AND reader.
Well, to be honest successfully moderating as many posts as the Trib or Sun-Times get on a big article would take a lot of time, time that reporters could be doing for other things, and so maybe it shouldn't be their jobs. Yet, so long as comment threads are unmoderated, there will be no real possibility for good discussion, so reporters wouldn't feel the need to engage the comments, because it honestly wouldn't be worth it. If the major papers actually cared about the quality of their online discourse, they would hire a couple mods to delete flames and spam at the very least, possibly even require people to sign into user names in order to post. Then I think the reporters might actually engage with commenters, since it might be something closer to a discussion than wading into a steaming pile of...you know.
Maybe the Ombudsman role could be reimagined and expanded - ombudspeople could patrol comment threads and steer the conversation in a constructive way - you could have commenter "executions" like Gawker and Wonkette do. If they don't do something to raise the discourse or at least keep out the hateful language I don't really see the point in newspaper comment threads. They are among the most vile on the internet and in my opinion really tarnish the masthead of the paper they're under.
I'm completely, unabashedly biased, but I think the newspapers should stick to what they do well, reporting and publishing the news, and leave the discussion/community stuff to other businesses that can give it their full attention.
One of the reasons for the Citizen was a frank assessment of my own news-gathering habits. I found myself spending more time on social news sites focused around things I was interested in rather than the actual web sites of the properties hosting the stories.
I've been working away on a few features for the comments here on the site (specifically, extending the voting system out to the comments, so you can earn clout points for leaving good comments and lose clout for leaving silly ones), that should help pluck up debate a bit more. Also, I'm knee-deep in interviewing candidates for editorial internships for the Citizen. I'm looking for round up about 3-4 folks like Len who will help beef up the stories shared on the site, vote up/down the good/bad stuff and fill out discussions on the site.
When you have a lot of people discussing things in one place, yes it gets tricky, but there are ways to make sense of it.
Hugh, I think some papers already employ folks called "Community Editors" who moderate comments on stories and blogs. I'm also a big fan of how Gawker handles its commenters. The executions are great.
Something we can all be thinking about...how can the conversations on here be improved (beyond the obvious "Brad needs to tell more people about the site.")?
Was away this morning meeting with possible sponsors, catching up on my to-be-submitted queue...
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