Comments Aren't Rocket Science

I've said it before and I'll say it again (and again): Managing comments on newspaper Web sites isn't exactly rocket science. But newspapers seem to keep thinking that it is.

Today's hapless example: Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, which turned on comments and discovered that, HORRORS, contributors were posting horrible things (even on wedding announcements, which is actually pretty funny). So what did The Bulletin do? It turned the comments off—while The Day, in neighboring New London convened a public forum about online comments, replete with various experts and editors (not necessarily the same thing), along with an earnest followup story in the paper that talks about "the relatively new and challenging world of online reader comments."

Relatively new world? Really? Maybe to The Day and the Bulletin. But there have been online comments for more than two decades now, beginning at places like The Well, Compuserve and AOL, and advancing through too many online forums to mention—some of them even run by newspapers. There's nothing new about comments. The only thing new is the newbies in the newspaper business that don't do their homework before turning them on.

What those veteran sites have learned—which papers like The Bulletin only seem to bother to find out through trial and error—is that fully anonymous, ungoverned comments turn into chaos. Surprise!

Let us count the ways—and the ways it could have been prevented: The Bulletin said it had trouble with profanity (try a profanity filter), "irrelevant ranting" (try registration and moderation) and "vitriol" (see previous recommendations). Yep, that's pretty much the usual list of complaints. And they all could have been avoided from the jump. (I'll link to my previous post on this again.)

To repeat: This isn't rocket science, and it's hardly a new field. The Bulletin says it is going to relaunch its comments with user registration and staff moderation (the latter is probably unnecessary if registration and user-policing are used); no word about a profanity filter (highly recommended). And like other newspapers before it who have taken these steps, The Bulletin will discover that the comments aren't as difficult as they first appear. Gee—maybe The Bulletin's editors could have avoided these problems if they'd just done a little research first.

Comments

[Nico Macdonald]

Many of these issues were discussed at an Innovation Forum Future Media series event Soapboxes in cyberspace: how can the media facilitate debate online? http://futuremedia.spy.co.uk/SoapboxesInCyberspace/ held at the Guardian Newsroom in London last year, and the discussion in the UK has developed somewhat from there. The best thing newspapers could do would simply be to look at the characteristics of conversation and debate in the real world and replicate them (to the extent it is possible) in the design of online fora, including comments.

[Michele McLellan]

Hi Mark. Good post. Keep reminding people. I've lately been talking with news organizations that seem to be figuring out comments and I've written some of that up here: www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/tips_for_keeping_comments_clean/

Michele

[Tim]

Actually, it was not The Day that turned off the comments. It was the Norwich Bulletin, which took part in the forum held by The Day.

[Mark Potts]

My apologies: I misread The Day's story and thought it was the paper that had turned off comments. I've corrected the post to show it was the Norwich Bulletin.

[Beth Lawton]

If the newspaper needs help, we've got it: The Newspaper Association of America released "The Online Community Cookbook" in March that (literally) has step-by-step instructions on how to deploy, manage and grow a healthy commenting and community interaction system on newspaper Web sites. It's at http://www.naa.org/digitaledge/cookbook

[Howard Owens]

I am fully responsible for all comment situations at all GateHouse papers, including the Bulletin.

We've been turning an incomplete commenting system on our papers because it's better -- if possible -- to have comments than not. While we wait for the proper community application to be built, we've gone with what we've had.

Of course, I was behind the Ventura County Star launching comments in 2004 ... while not the first newspaper to launch comments on stories, it was a very uncommon practice back then and many papers had tried comments and stopped. We were determined to make it work, and were ultimately successful.

The subsequent press coverage of what happened in Ventura helped raise comments again as an option for newspaper sites.

So I've pushed for our sites to have comments with full knowledge of what _might_ happen.

Things don't go wrong in every case, and its important to give it a try. We have some papers running anonymous comments without a problem. In fact, one of our larger papers doesn't want to use our registration system once its available, preferring its current system.

We have a registration-based comment system slated to launch on or about June 1. I'm not sure how quickly it will roll out to any specific GHS paper.