There's an interesting debate going on inside newsrooms in the Twin Cities and around the country. It's about comments (which we have here at DeBlog). Reading this as the "Featured Comment" on C.J.'s column on StarTribune.com got me thinking about this today: "CJ: I can't believe she still has a job. She is a complete moron." (the Strib apparently has some sort of automated script set up that pulls a random comment and features it at the top of the page. Cool concept, as it publicizes the idea that there are comments, but often the featured comment is embarassing or a slam of the story)
Twin Cities Daily Planet is struggling with this issue [via]. Minneapolis Metblogs too. I've seen hundreds of comments on StarTribune.com and TwinCities.com (The Pi Press) that are just plain vulgar and hateful. Most of the comments here on my blog have been great (almost all of them actually). But when you open up general news stories to comments, it seems to give people permission to just go crazy.
You might wonder why the sites use comments. The reigning metrics in measuring online audience right now are "time of engagement" and "page views." Comments add time spent on a site, because it takes awhile to write comments. They also get people to come back time and time again in order to check for follow-ups to their comments.
So what do you think? Should WCCO.com have comments on every story? Do you want to chime in on stories? Does being web 2.0 mean that EVERYTHING should be interactive? We have a button at the bottom of our stories that invites people to tell us more (and it's been quite helpful in adding depth to some of our stories).
