I can hardly make it through a Seattle Times article these days without running into some inane and often offensive comment from a reader posted at the bottom.
Why does the Seattle Times, unlike many major newspapapers, allow reader comments on ALL of its articles, including ones involving deaths and serious crimes?
And since they do, why do they show excerpts of the last few comments at the end of each article, so that it’s almost impossible to finish the article without reading someone’s usually off-the-cuff and occasionally racist or otherwise cringe-worthy opinion?
For comparison:
The New York Times and BBC News allow comments on most opinion pieces and selected articles, but keep those on separate pages. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post allow comments on nearly everything (or maybe everything) but the Journal requires you to be a paid subscriber, and both papers keep comments on separate pages.
(In other words, if you click into the comment section to read it at least you know what you’re getting into.)
I do comment on blogs and newspaper articles (and by the way, if you want to comment on this post just click on the article title and scroll to the end of the post,) but making reader comments part of the reporting, which is what the current setup effectively does, brings the quality of the newspaper down. WAY down.
(And yes, I’ve already written to the Seattle Times about this. 
)
