Three lessons from running comments at The Times of London.
By Ben Whitelaw
Ben Whitelaw led the team moderating comments for The Times of London as its former communities editor. Ben is also a media strategy consultant at FT Strategies and the founder of Everything in Moderation, a weekly newsletter charting the forces shaping the future of online speech and the internet. This piece was originally published by New_ Public.
In the 2010s, news publishers couldn’t shut their comment sections fast enough. The space “below the line” had become a noisy, thankless place to spend your time, where bile and bad-faith arguments too often drowned out any genuine discussion or personal connection, or skewedthe way readers thought about the journalism above.
Publishers saw comment sections as a reputational hazard and a cost center and, by the middle of the decade, a dozen sites — including Popular Science, Chicago Sun-Times, Motherboard, Reuters, and NPR — had significantly reduced or completely disabled commenting features. Each argued, often without the data to back it up, that its readers preferred to discuss stories via social media. And so what was once heralded as a new frontier of reader dialog died a not-so-quiet death.
July 16, 2024-A decade on, something surprising is happening: Reader comments are having a mini renaissance. After years of chasing social media engagement and being burned in the process, publishers have realized that commenting has a tangible value — to the broader public, yes, but also in terms of advertising and subscription revenue.
Full Article: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/newsrooms-are-taking-comments-seriously-again/
Courtesy: https://www.niemanlab.org/
