Newspaper pulls plug on online comment feature

[Rose Siding]

snip>
"All of us were sad we had to shut it down at all," said Moore, noting he had noticed a surge of nasty, off-topic comments in recent weeks. "We didn't have the staff to spend 24 hours a day watching this and we didn't want to have to spend our time doing that."

Newspapers across the country are wrestling with similar issues amid calls for more transparency in the news gathering process and greater public participation.

It is still rare for newspapers to permit the kind of public commentary on individual stories allowed by the Ventura County Star, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington D.C.-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.
...
The newspaper posted a long statement explaining its decision.
"We started the comments in January…Wonderful conversations ensued. Readers began talking with each other, offering opinions, raising the bar of discourse in the county. They were voices we didn't normally hear from....

"Very quickly, race become the common theme on many of the topic threads…
"The viciousness of the comments began to escalate...

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-052005blog_lat,0,4419752,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[billbuckhead]

1. Race is the unspoken deciding factor in the socalled red states

The reason the red staters are pro fundie, pro "guns are the solution to all problems both foriegn and domestic" crowd and so uncivil to their fellow citizens is racial fear. The Southern strategy still works.

[PSPS]

2. This isn't surprising

All you have to do is read any unmoderated group in Usenet, or just about any open blog. The topics eventually get hit by trolls who hijack them with some kind of off-topic nonsense, frequently including epithets of some kind.

Personally, I think these bored adolescents (or adults with arrested development) sit at home with their pants around their ankles when they do this.