In a recent On the Media interview with Carole Tarrant, the Roanoke Times editor defends the place of user comments online - an embattled subject in recent weeks, one taken up by blogging heads Gawker and BuzzMachine, alike.

While many have pointed to a void of thoughtful discussion in the comment box, as Gawker's Sheila McClear recently said, "...There is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers."

Tarrant disagrees, saying that users moderate themselves once the community has been defined.

"...When you've been doing it long enough, I think the community of people participating, they know what the ground rules are. And I really believe if you're a newspaper online and you don't allow this, you're not really online," said Tarrant. "We have a whole generation that's trained to expect to be able to voice their opinion, not just to read the news but to talk about it or share it, and that may be ugly or it may be really provocative, but I want to hear it."

Tarrant also points to the Virginia Tech massacre, a local crisis, that the paper felt necessitated creating a place for readers to share.

 "We initially put up just our generic message board (but) there were a few people that tried to hijack it and talk about gun control. So we pulled down that message board and we went to something called legacy.com, which is a vendor many newspapers use to post their obituaries, and attached to those obituaries are moderated message boards. And they are very much screened. Comments are not posted live. They're looked at by editors within legacy.com," explained Tarrant. "And we personally couldn't spend the time right then to look at those comments because we were so busy trying to cover the news."

Although figuring out a comment solution that worked took trial and error, for Tarrant, it was worth it. "To not have that just would have been a huge disservice to the community."

Source: On the Media