Are Comments Useful?

A moment of tension - or at least controversy - during the “Tech-Politics” session was when a journalist asked what was the journalistic advantage of having all these reader-contributed comments after an article. If people are commenting on such trivial issues, such as how many question marks to use, what is their purpose? Reading those comments gives him a headache.

The panelists disagreed, and Chuck DeFeo said his mindset is the problem with traditional mainstream media.

Panelist Micah Sifry quickly argued that comments are important because they provide valuable information to the journalist. “Your audience is smarter than you,” he said.

But you can’t expect your audience to automatically generate brilliant comments, he said. They must be encouraged.

Sifry suggested that the traditional journalist has to get involved with the audience. The journalist has to prove that he or she is paying attention. He or she has to read the comments and respond to them. When newspapers don’t pay attention to comments, Sifry said, the process will fail.

Other journalists added their suggestions for how comments can be nurtured to be more useful. Panelist Nancy Scola suggested using the community model, in which a community of readers can decide to take down an inappropriate post.

Panelist Colin Delany offered the example of Slate.com, which takes the best comments and puts them together in an easy-to-digest discussion. He said the audience will then take the process much more seriously and contribute substantial comments.

In many ways, this discussion does get to the root of the so-called problem with or controversy over traditional mainstream media. Are comments useful to the process of journalism, or are they just a business model that will generate more readers? If journalists do not understand the power of comments - that yes, the collective audience knows more than one individual journalist - then the comments will be ignored. They will accumulate, but they will not be nurtured and therefore will not generate useful, substantial, thoughtful material.