The Democrat and Chronicle calls its comment section "StoryChat". It's a simple message board where message threads are tied to stories. Depending on the story content, the quality of the chat ranges from pretty good to Internet rant. The quality of discussion seems inverse to the hotness of the topic, and discussions often go off the rails: yesterday's
stem cell discussion, for example, starts with a rant about the war in Iraq.
Though StoryChat looks like a run-of-the-mill circa-1999 bulletin board system, it is a pioneer in Rochester's mainstream media. The major radio and TV stations have nothing like it. So, kudos to the D&C for making the effort.
It's interesting to see newspapers and other media struggle with issues that are old hat for Internet media. For example, Howard Owens
has a post that discusses anonymity on the Internet, a subject near and dear to me. One of the features of Gannett Blog is
Commentz Korner, where the Editor keeps track of racist, sexist or offensive comments.
What's missing from the D&C story chat, and from other discussions I've seen, is a sense that the online community can be self-regulating. Internet-only sites that have a large number of anonymous or pseudonymous contributors have developed sophisticated reputation and ranking systems.
Slashdot is one example of a user-run comment ranking system that is pretty effective at separating the better comments from junk.
Wikipedia uses a reputation system to maintain a pretty high quality standard for all volunteers. In Rochester,
RocWiki is also self-policing community site.
So, I salute the D&C for trying StoryChat, but they need to step back from the editor/consumer model and embrace the new model of user-generated and moderated content.