Back in the dark ages, maybe five or six years ago, I argued pretty strongly that the local paper should allow unfettered comments on its stories.  I thought they needed to follow the lead of blogs and embrace the idea of having a conversation with their audience.  Oh how smart I thought I was, and oh how wrong I now believe I was.  It's not that I've given up on the idea of having a conversation with your audience, it's just that comments on news stories don't generate conversation – unless you consider inviting dozens or hundreds of people into a room and watching them insult each other to be conversation.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was this story in the Winston-Salem Journal.  The article is about non-profits seeing an increasing need for their services, but the general public not seeing it because people are putting up a brave front.  Somehow that article generated a comment string that veered off into anti-Semitism various other rants and I don't have the stomach or time to read them all to see how it happened.  Sadly, it's par for the course for the Journal's site and it's indicative of the tiny minds that frequent the site and leave behind turdballs also called comments.

It might be a better situation if news sites treated story moderation as community moderation; they could impose some order if they actively moderated the comments, but that's more than a full time job and I just don't think they have the staff or budget to do it.  That's why I'm going to reverse course and say that if I were king of the world I'd turn off story comments UNLESS active moderation was possible.