There’s been much discussion about the comments policy at the online website, GazetteXtra.com, of a nearby newspaper, the Janesville Gazette. They’ve made a few changes, to limit comments on some types of stories, and to make comments visible only after a reader’s click.
It’s a private website, and they can have the comments policy (none, some, any & all) that they want.
The principal choices, in print, or online, before or since the web, all involve a newspaper’s original and re-published reporting. Although many bloggers dislike newspapers, I’m someone who hopes for a revival of newspapers with a plucky, independent streak, willing to counter-balance political authority. We’ve a government of checks and balances, and we also do better with a civil society in which the press operates as a check on officials’ often self-serving claims.
A press need not function as a counter-balance; I’d simply contend that a press that fails to do so, that caters to politicians as though press agents, ill-serves society.
That’s not just a libertarian bias, either. I’m quite sure that most people admire reporters who take an independent line from political authority. It’s part — a very old part — of our heritage on this continent. (Just as pamphleteering is a very American predecessor of contemporary blogging.)
Comments or their absence won’t change the question before a newspaper: what do you say about political authority? There will be a place for a paper, perhaps with an aging demographic, that favors All-The News-That’s-Fit-to-Bolster-and Re-Elect. We have papers like that nearby now.
It’s almost certainly a declining demographic, occupying an ever-smaller place; even the City of Whitewater’s last community survey relied on an unrepresentative, truly odd sample to arrive at lukewarm results. See, Community Surveys and Popularity Real and Imagined.
The biggest choices that the Gazette, or any newspaper, makes won’t involve comments, and they certainly won’t involve bloggers. They’ll involve the paper’s relationship to politicians and bureaucrats, and how the newspaper’s readers feel about that relationship.