Editor & Publisher is reporting that The Washington Post post has proclaimed its experiment with allowing comments to some of the stories in its online edition a success:
NEW YORK Washingtonpost.com, taking a bold step, has enabled user comments on many of its stories for over a month now — and the move has been deemed a success by the site’s editors. But soon the feature will be put to the test as it is extended to every article on the site, including those in the Politics, World and Nation sections.
The comments feature initially debuted in the Sports section, with registered users allowed to post their own commentary directly below individual stories and respond to one another, as on blogs. Soon, the paper opened up the Metro and Style sections to comments as well, in addition to several weekly sections.
Jim Brady, the editor of Washingtonpost.com, says that the comments feature “extends our mission of trying to generate a dialogue between readers and journalists,” and says that, with only modest promotional efforts, he has been very satisfied with the amount of reader reaction in the sections where comments have been enabled.
The folks at the WaPo aren’t the radical libertarians that many bloggers are:
To help keep objectionable material from being posted, the site has two people actively monitoring the site’s comment-enabled pages during high-traffic hours during the day. The site’s news desk acts in a supplementary role, monitoring comments as needed during the day and taking over the task at night.
A profanity filter automatically removes the more obvious abuses of the commenting function, but editors are still needed to keep users from posting personal attacks against the journalists and other commenters. Brady says that a feature where readers can flag abusive comments posted by others acts like a tip sheet for the staffers monitoring the site.
I don’t think it’s just a lack of time or staff or incivility that keeps most bloggers from editing their readers’ comments.  I think it’s a reluctance to censor the work of others.
This is an outcome that hadn’t occurred to me. Perhaps instead of coopting or fighting blogs the major newspapers will become blogs.
Maybe it’s already begun. That would certainly explain the lack of fact checking we’ve seen lately. The blogs made them do it!
