Open for comments
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
Nothing gets my goat quite like a poorly researched news article with no public commenting system. This is the year 2006 and the era of weblogs and open communication on the Web, and we have developed a certain expectation for interaction with our news sources. Those in technological fields know quite well that errors in news stories are all too common, and some form of public review is essential to ensure that less knowledgeable readers don’t get a heap of misinformation.
For a large part, news organizations get it. The provision of some form of commenting system is very much the norm on online news sites. Whether they’re called comments, TalkBack, public discussion, or reader responses, most popular online news sources have some form of public feedback system that gives readers immediate access to the responses.
However, there are still plenty of news sources — some of them quite major — that haven’t caught up to the times. Often they will simply link to their generic message board system, which significantly discourages both the posting of responses and the reading of those responses, as the messages are not directly linked with the article. In other cases, they will only provide a way to privately contact the author of the article or the editor, and you will find that your response very seldom affects the content of the article in question, even if the author confirms that you are right.
Luckily, this is a problem that seems to be slowly dying away as the news industry has generally recognized this change in culture and the benefits it has produced. Market forces may also be playing a role, as people will naturally flock to sources where they can see more discussion on the subject and even participate in said discussion. This concept was at the core of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the Web, and it seems inevitable that it is the direction in which the Web will continue to progress.