How journalists are coping with reader comments and why

Sunday Herald has a really interesting piece on how some of Scotland's leading journalists are coping with reader comments, which makes for interesting and revealing reading (via Martin Stabe).

Most can't abide or be bothered with them for more or less obvious reasons; it's also interesting to consider that those who do see value in them are both beat journalists addressing a niche audience (Spectator and a BBC blog).

The article reminds me of Gawker's recent piece arguing that newspapers shouldn’t allow comments at all, at least not on news articles - a position I have some sympathy with. Perhaps comments should be welcomed on a news site’s blogs and forums only, while for instance using services such as Twingly to visualise the conversation the site’s news articles spur elsewhere on the web.

Now that's the how, Adam Tinworth and his colleague Andrew Rogers have a few interesting thoughts on why journalists shy away from comments. Adam has these suggestions:

1. The lack of defined community around national newspapers. This leads to a lack of consequences. You aren't discussing with your peers or neighbours, but with random strangers. Misbehaviour has no particular social consequence. The worse possible consequence here is being banned from that particular community - but usually it's pretty trivial to return under a different name.
2. The relative novelty of freely-available commenting on news. It will take years for a set of standard behaviours for authors and commenters to emerge. As those behavioural norms emerge more things will be seen as unacceptable.
3. Anonymity. It's been a long-treasured part of internet culture that you can craft new identities for yourself which have little or no relationship to your real-world identity. Could it be that, in some parts of the internet, that boon is, in fact, a bane? And that injecting consequence into the debate is the only way to improve its standards?

Another explanation that was put to me by a tabloid journalist, was that the fact that she couldn't be herself - as in a person who had such and such values and opinions - but had to represent the newspaper, made it a lot more difficult to engage in conversation with readers online. If I understand her correctly, we're back to how the mantra of objectivity inhibits journalists in this brave new world of ours.

I haven't encountered this particular obstacle myself, but then I predominantly write for journalists in my day-job - and if we get vitriolic comments it's most likely for missing a comma, or misspelling, or for not being good representatives for journalism at large - I can imagine it would feel much more inhibiting not being able to show your colours if the discussion is on politics, policy etc. To paraphrase Adriana, 'on the internet you can't behave like an institution. If you want to behave like one, you get isolated and bypassed.....