Opening the door to comments

Jonathan Dube points out that the Washington Post, CBS News and Newsweek all have added comment capabilities to story pages. I don't think comments are the best way to build community, comments are infinitely better than no conversation at all. We've come quite a way from the days when editors would look at you and say, in all seriousness: "You mean you let them say anything they want?"

Comments

Are you kidding? Most of us still have editors saying that to us. There is good movement toward commenting and building community through forums, etc., but it's taking a tremendous amount of effort.

Comments on stories are the candy-in-the-checkout-line of participation -- impulse buys. The purpose should be to drive people into a deeper relationship with the side. Ideally, they are tied to profiles and other forms of participation. Comments when working right can also lead to mighty powerful and important conversations and a way of extending the story in a way no reporter could do on his or her own. We saw this many, many times in Ventura.

Comments are just an obvious and necessary part of participation.

YMMV, of course.

We have enough cross-company communications that our top editors are pretty buzzed about community conversation these days. It's the Bluffton Kool-Aid: At a conference for editors a few months ago, several were joking they were going to have wristbands made with the letters WWBD -- for "What Would Bluffton Do?" USA Today, circulation 2.5 million, recently had Kyle Poplin, editor of Bluffton Today, circulation 18,000, come in for a presentation on why you shouldn't be afraid of your readers.

We don't have commenting attached to news stories on most of our sites yet for reasons having to do with legacy technology. But Ken Rickard and our CMS group both recently wrote Ajax-based demonstrations of how to add commenting to static Web pages, so we'll get it fairly soon.

In general we've found that when there is a robust, open blogging environment attached to a news site, the comment activity tends to gravitate there rather than to the news stories. We've also seen a strong trend over time toward longer threads of commenting, with more interaction and less hit-and-run.

I don't want to blow our own horn too much, but the Globe and Mail -- a national newspaper based in Toronto -- has had comments on all globeandmail.com stories for over a year now, and was to my knowledge the first major newspaper in North America to offer them. We've also had "social bookmarking" tools like the New York Times just launched for several months now.

Mathew Ingram