Reader comments on the website

Make the readers have to register to be able to post comments, and post real names with said comments. That will discourage most idiots. It's the anonymity that idiots crave. And make the registration process onerous; collect lots of marketing information, creating, in-turn, feature-rich lists of subscribers that you can sell to spamm-- er, advertisers so they can direct sell to those lists.

 

Excellent suggestion that will get laughed at in the 10 a.m. meeting. The higher ups who believe in the Internet wants clicks. They welcome all comments. If they are racist and/or sexist, they simply do not care. No way they will make it difficult on these people to make posts.

 

Never liked the idea of anonymous comments. The lack of accountability usually leads to abuse and spoils it for everyone else. Most of the comments at my shop are from local u and state u fans bashing each other. Tends to get ugly - and personal - pretty quickly. Very rarely does anything positive come from any comments.

 

Glen: Our local paper actually pulls out four or so and uses them on the op-ed page with only the screen name as attribution. I believe this was done even before registration was required.

You always call to confirm a letter to the editor, but you let these go? I never understood it.

 

Freddie,

Where do you get these crazy ideas on managment? They aren't even in yet at 10 a.m. for a meeting. C'mon.

 

This thinking is so old, it wasn't even important in this decade.

"Clicks" on comment boards don't translate into anything, Fredrick.

I'm pretty low-key here, but this deal where you take basically any thread here and turn it on its head to bash middle and upper management is really, really tiresome.

 

So true. If your management is looking for those kinds of clicks, then they clearly are frighteningly clueless. Ho-hum.

 

The way I see it is these upper management people are the enemy. They are the ones taking the jobs away from my friends. They are the ones that listened to all the horrible advice given by Internet-only/citizen journalist/slash the print staff people and took these suggestions to the publishers. They are misguided people who do not care about quality work, just saving their own asses/slashing staffs.
If somebody would show me that upper management types are not pretty much the main reason our business has gone to hell, then I'd gladly change my position.

 

I like that suggestion...

 

The people who post comments are your readers. Figure out a way to embrace them, instead of driving them away by calling them dumb.

The beauty about comments and other internet tools is that they have brought on the age of participation. You have to build the relationship with not just the people you're interviewing, but the people for whom you're writing.

 

I hate story comments. Read a great piece in Gawker not long ago that, to paraphrase, said "newspapers should not be slumming as blogs."

That said, I recognize they are never going away and must be dealt with. To answer the original question, we don't allow attacks on minors, no matter what the story, so that extends to prep sports. They can talk smack about the team ("Nimrods suck!") but not individual players ("The Nimrod quarterback sucks!"). We'll delete the whole comment, not just the offending part.