National Journal
As of Friday, National Journal Editor-in-Chief writes, “we’ll join the growing number of sites that are choosing to forgo public comments on most stories.”
Comments are currently disappointing, he writes: “For every smart argument, there’s a round of ad hominem attacks—not just fierce partisan feuding, but the worst kind of abusive, racist, and sexist name-calling imaginable.”
Comments sections will stay “open and visible to National Journal’s members” and “Our reporters and editors will remain extremely active and accessible on Twitter, where the discourse is abbreviated but usually civil,” he writes. You can also email your thoughts, and occastionally NJ will open up comments sections on stories “where the unique perspectives and ideas and suggestions of individual readers can add immeasurably to our journalism.”
Last year The Huffington Post changed its commenting policy, requiring a Facebook login to post. Splitsider and Popular Science eliminated comments altogether. Ugly comments “became too much to really fight back” against, Dan Nosowitz, then a PopSci writer, said in an interview at the time.
“Some sites have responded by devoting substantial time and effort to monitoring and editing comments,” Grieve writes, “but we’d rather put our resources into the journalism that brings readers to National Journal in the first place.”
Related: Anonymous comments can be ‘a frothing, bubbling cauldron of insanity’
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