Newspaper comment sections are often “filled with racism, homophobia and barely literate anti-feminist rants,” New York Times community manager Bassey Etim says in an interview with Samantha Henig.
I don’t see how you can claim to respect your readers and allow their well-considered thoughts to live side by side with comments from people who write countless posts every day to satisfy a perverse craving for causing conflict among humans.
Etim and Henig spoke about Michael Erard’s think piece about comments, published in Sunday’s Times Magazine. Among the ideas Erard floats: By placing comments below posts, news organizations misread their potential and created “the steerage class of the public discourse.”
The Times has 13 moderators, Henig reports, and the paper considers several criteria before turning on comments, among them: “How interesting can responses to this issue be?” Etim says.
Gawker honcho Nick Denton will publish a “‘manifesto’ of sorts that will outline Gawker’s plan to further blur the line between reporters and readers and explain readers’ rights,” Nick Bilton writes. “Among them, there is “the right to experience legible conversations” on the site.”
Gawker Media’s Kinja platform will see some improvements as well. Bilton calls Denton’s embrace of comments, even anonymous ones, “enlightened self-interest,” noting that each person conversing on the site is contributing clicks.
But other publishers are looking for metrics beyond pageviews, and a form of commenting can figure in such plans, Josh Sternberg writes:
The new business site Quartz, for example, while still sells on a CPM basis, is trying to optimize user behavior. It recently began a new annotating commenting system that lets the qualified reader — one who’s registered and whose comments have been vetted by editors — comment along side paragraphs and not at the bottom of the article. It’s sponsored by Citi, so every time a reader opens the comment box, they see a message that reads “Annotations presented by Citi.” Instead of monetizing the content, Quartz is monetizing the act of commenting.
Previously: 25% of people have posted anonymous comments, Pew finds | Huffington Post deletes 75 percent of incoming comments | Huffington Post will end anonymous comments | Anonymous comments can be ‘a frothing, bubbling cauldron of insanity’
