Newspapers should not have comments
This amazing WSJ article that everyone’s talking about, A Manifesto for Slow Communications, has only three comments - all pretty lame ones. People are discussing it on their blogs, via Twitter, in real life. But the three comments sit there wrongly representing the success of the article, newspaper readers’ engagement, the WSJ’s “digital strategy,” and the importance of reader feedback.
If comments were turned off, journalists would be more likely to go to other blogs and Twitter and read the real conversation, infusing their follow up articles with fresh ideas and relevancy. That’s what I do with my blog.
Plus we all know newspaper commenters are completely psycho nutbags so no one would miss it. In fact turning the comments off would make reading a news site more pleasant for the rest of us.
The majority of comments re: newspaper articles that I read on blogs, or on twitter, are well thought out, often dissenting, and are open to the possibility that they’ve missed something.
The majority of comments re: newspaper articles that I read on newspaper websites fall somewhere between ignorant and offensive, normally about 1/5th treading close to being racist.
I would not miss comments, were they eliminated from the sites of every newspaper I read. Commentary that isn’t connected to an identity is rarely insightful, as people LIKE to claim insight, and generally cling to anonymity in the face of oppression, or to be a dick.
