Today’s Deep Thought

I agree: daily I see comments on the sites of dozens of newspapers around the English-speaking world and few have adopted any of the fairly successful models for raising the bar enough to keep comments down to manageable quantity, to weed out the trolls and the willfully ignorant, and to encourage commenters to develop (or extend) good online reputations. I think most newspapers would find appropriate a combination of the Slashdot karma model plus a good chunk of the Metafilter community model. So that means something like a $5 membership fee--a barrier to entry just high enough to stop the drive-by firebrands who aren't vested in the community--, a few heartless moderators to keep commenters on topic and civil, a way to rate the comments of others so that Cory Doctorow-style "whuffie" is accumulated, and personal profile pages that allow for a decent amount of modification so that commenters can include bio info, links to other web sites, location information, etc., and that include recent comments and their ratings by others.

aka "Todd does a pretty good David Sedaris imitation"

Grant - Yes, I love social media, but I think there's an issue with the kind of comments that newspaper stories get and the "ease of entry."

Community moderation is a good way to go at... profiles perhaps, some kind of very basic registration. Newspapers don't seem quite ready to wade into this, but the sites that do require some "skin in the game" seem to get the smartest contributors, the most thoughtful people - folks who are turned off by a lot of random nonsense.

I think mainstream media comes to respect social media more, too, when the quality of input rises.

Most newspapers -- and I grew up as a journalist in them -- have the misguided notion that they fulfill some pledge for openess by letting everyone comment all the time. Yet, most have very strict rules on publishing letters to the editors so the cranks don't take over. No hint of consistency. As a result, most newspaper forums I see have deteriorated into unmoderated urination contests between a handful of, yes, cranks, thus driving off thoughtful comment.