User comments are becoming more and more popular on online news sites. Even the NY Times is now allowing moderated comments on selected articles. However, do these comments have a place in controversial breaking news stories?

Here’s an example: Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor was not yet dead when users began to post comments on what lead to his demise on online news sites.

Some comments were just praying for Taylor and wishing him well. However, others were not so friendly, making racist remarks and commenting on how Taylor’s past had caught up with him. Many posts were angry and accusatory, from both sides. Editors were forced to start deleting many of the comments.

At MiamiHerald.com the comments on the Taylor story got so bad that editors decided to suspend feedback on all Taylor stories for the next day, following one in four comments being deleted.

Both ESPN.com and WashingtonPost.com reported not having as large of a problem with comments on the Taylor story. Straus said only about 200 of the more than 5,000 comments were deleted at WashingtonPost.com. One reason for these differences is that both sites require users to register before commenting, and to confirm an e-mail address, while MiamiHerald.com does not.

"After coming to online from a print background, after seeing penetration decline," said Hal Straus, Interactivity and Communities Editor at WashingtonPost.com, "it's very heartening to me that when you're online, your audience engages with what you're producing. But certainly we want to make the level of discussion better."

The Herald has found the open commenting very useful in the past. Readers can comment on errors, allowing them to quickly be corrected. At the Herald, people feel comfortable leaving tips in the feedback forums, and those tips have helped reporters in their reporting, editors said.

Online readers can also respond to the site's newsgathering process, for example, on the first day of the Taylor coverage many readers were outraged that the site had reported Taylor's home address. Rick Hirsch, managing editor for multimedia at MiamiHerald.com, said the site does that in crime stories so people know if their own home or business is affected, but they decided to remove the address in subsequent versions of the story.

The challenge to editors is how to encourage the positive comments and discourage those that personally attack people or are racist.

Hirsch says, "people want to talk about stories. There is bad there, but there's a lot of good. There are times they make me think about things I wouldn't have thought about."

Editors at both Cincinnati.com and CincyMOMS had the same problems with commenting over a story about a toddler who died of heartstroke while left alone in her mother’s car.

Karen Gutierrez, managing editor at CincyMOMS, said she let the discussion forums continue largely unmoderated, and longer than normal because "it seemed like people really wanted to talk about it, even though people were getting angry with each other."

at Cincinnati.com, many comments on the story were deleted, sometimes 10 percent, sometimes 30 percent, according to Deputy Managing Editor Chris Graves.

Graves said, "It's a brave new world, and one that we don't fully own anymore as journalists. The community is requiring us to rethink and retool ourselves. Frankly, I think that's a beautiful thing. I think that's the basis of the First Amendment."

Source : Poynter Online