"And a forum for ideas should not involve running debates on whose mother does what to whom. Allowing that only elevates bad behavior and only empowers bullies. Now, I know, there are many who use the comment function in a genuine, thoughtful way and will truly miss the opportunity to engage with others about the latest vote in Madison or latest Bucks move.... I am sorry that others have ruined it for you. In some ways, this is the inevitable end of a progression. We have long blocked comments on stories we know are magnets for vile, demeaning and often racist comments.... Several years ago, we blocked comments on all news stories, as the comments often devolved into bickering, name-calling and libel-slinging accusations.... [I]f you are upset about the decision on comments... please take it elsewhere."
Writes Greg Borowski, the executive editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, announcing the end of the comments function in "Journal Sentinel to end commenting on stories, seek new ways to connect with and serve readers" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).
८५ टिप्पण्या:
Next announcement, the end of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The truth hurts. A lot.
Misandry, transhumanity, albinophobia, genderism, color judgments, class bigotry... #HateLovesAbortion
That said, diversity breeds adversity.
haHa. He didn't like what they were saying. Although an echo chamber the comments section of NYT articles is revelatory at worst and entertaining at best. The ultimate Trump Derangement Syndrome forum.
They're getting too many comments on how awful they are and how awful Democrats are, but I repeat myself.
Oh those pesky commenters! Our local paper opened comments again but the function is little used.
I can remember the early days of blogs, when the publisher assigned the new blog thingy to be the domain of some new young reporter - who had absolutely nothing of interest to say.
At least nothing that wouldn't anger some advertiser or embarrass a local personage.
seems like this could be shortened to: Journal Sentinel to end
seriously..
How Long? How Long before the layoffs? How Long before the closures? How Long before it's GONE ??
the people commenting, were the last people Reading. This is true for a LOT of places
No comment.
Fake names might just mean that they're not retired and truth is punished in a cancel culture.
Someone should send Borowski some tampons for his asshole.
Liberal/Left media does NOT want pushback. Especially from the Center or rightwing. So they just label it all "racist" and stop anyone's ability to comment.
They long for the days when it was a one-way street. They told us the News and we just listened or wrote a letter to the editor, which they decided to publish - or not.
Of course, Dumbo Cons gave the liberal/left the weapon of "hate speech" and "racism will not be tolerated", so all the liberal/left has to do is label anything they don't like "racist" or "hate speech" and poof they can ban it. BTW, the editor gave the game away by talking about Misogyamy, which just means "I dont like it".
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is finally free to lie.
We have here a natural experiment: a significant change in policy directly affecting the readership. Will the readership notice? Care? Respond, and if so mildly or more forcefully? Will the paper experience the Bud Light Moment, where its complacent expectations of a captive market continuing no matter how contemptuously the vendor behaves?
Inquiring minds want to know. Let's watch and learn.
"In some ways, this is the inevitable end of [progressivism]." FIFY
These were audio comments, and people were forced to listen? The comments were written and people were forced to read?
Yes, in modern Progressivism - as distinct from early 20th Century Progressivism - militant, fanatical suppression of dissent is a prominent feature.
The Milwaukee Journal is a local, liberal, lying propaganda rag. They are eliminating comments in order not to be challenged.
Molly Beck and Dan Bice just tow the party line and regurgitate anything they are assigned to say. They get challenged on X.
Milwaukee will continue to decline while Dane County and Madison guard their Ivory Towers.
Los Angeles Daily News (which is at least a newspaper as opposed to the Los Angeles Times which is a journal of mostly political opinion) has adopted the same policy as of February 1.
Verification of commenter IDs by say, registration via uploading name, address, phone, Drivers' License #, seems too much to ask, I guess? because the problem is not the vile comments, it is the ability to make vile comments anonymously. With your name right there on the comment, heck, fewer vile comments and a direct means of identification of the vile commenters, for one and all. Nah, I must be missing something here, that seems waaaaaay too easy to implement, to allow continued comments.
I bet Milwaukee Journal Sentinel readers are as well informed as Chicago Sun-Times readers.
They dont tell anyone shit.
But both are a step above the NYT who just lie about things.
"Fake names might just mean that they're not retired and truth is punished in a cancel culture."
That's why I started out with a pseudonym, and cancel culture hadn't even really taken off yet.
mikee....sure. Lets do it with voting first.
"No one should have to listen to a few people – standing bravely behind fake names – lob racist or misogynistic taunts at them, or others."
Yes, they should, if they're so pathetically stupid that they're incapable of simply skipping over the comment and going on to the next one.
"And a forum for ideas should not involve running debates on whose mother does what to whom."
So don't join in the debate.
So, calling people "MAGAts" (maggots) for disagreeing with you is a ok, right?
It's only saying that "trans women are mentally defective men" that caused the comments to go away.
mikee said...
Verification of commenter IDs by say, registration via uploading name, address, phone, Drivers' License #, seems too much to ask, I guess? because the problem is not the vile comments, it is the ability to make vile comments anonymously.
Ah, yes, "vile comments" like "You are lying when you claim that 'X civilians have been killed in Gaza.' You are lying because the numbers came from Hamas, the same terrorist group that claimed that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 500 people, only to have it turn out, after the sun came out and people could see the hospital, that Hamas had bombed the parking lot, Israel hadn't done anything, and the death toll was under 20. Therefore ANY quoting of Hamas, without identifying the claim as coming from Hamas and pointing out what liars they are, is a lie."
That's to cancel culture, telling the truth is a risky act. So no, I'm not going to give my name / address / phone / Drivers' License #, and only a monster who wants to dox people and kill them / bomb their homes / destroy their lives would ask.
If you are so pathetically f'ed up that you can't handle people disagreeing with you, and being allowed to do so in public, YOU are the one who needs to leave the comments section.
Or just not read it
Long overdue. Every newspaper and news outlet should put an end to it. Write letters to the editor, but this endless, gaseous effluvium of opinion is tiresome.
Catching up on Detroit Sports this morning (Lions news) I noted that the Detroit Free Press is ending comments effective tomorrow. I would imagine the Detroit News will also.
I'm sure it's too much for these papers to manage. Honestly, Ann, I'm not sure how you've managed it over the years. But these are just people reacting to the stories, taking part in the stories, voicing their opinions, well...perhaps it's just too easy online. I go way back. I used to write letters to the editor at all sorts of national and local papers, so I've been irritating people for years now.
But here's what's actually happening. The papers are going out of business. People, well- many of them, have had their fill of 'journalists' who write opinion columns, they put a factoid in it that they heard from Rachel Maddow and tell us that, "Experts say", or "Anonymous sources tell us". Well...that's gone on for years and I think the jig is up. People have sought out, and found more reliable sources and what is left is a slimmed down staff of people with a journalism or sociology degree, writing about things that interest them. And given the staff limitations- hell, they can barely turn in an investigative report that has actual sources they can cite- it's pretty near impossible for them to manage their comments section.
So...good luck to the team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I'm sure it's been a good run. They should probably stick around and send a reporter or two to Chicago this summer. I'm sure the Democratic Convention is going to be a festival of activists. Should be a fun story to cover.
Silence!
Perhaps OT:
Allowing that only elevates bad behavior and only empowers bullies.
I think it would be an interesting sociological study to do comparative linguistic analyses of the comments sections of same-topic stories between, say, the NYT and WSJ.
My bet is that the NYT comments use I/me, as well as emotive and dehumanizing language, far more often.
But then I'd say that, wouldn't I?
Comments sections are so much better than the old days where the papers would publish just a few hand picked "Letters to the Editor" ... I love the rise of citizen journalism, it's less yellow IMHO, LOL.
"the people commenting, were the last people Reading. This is true for a LOT of places"
Bingo! Except for a smattering of the elderly, these days few people are interested in information sources where they can't add their two cents. Because there's lots of other sources where they can.
I stopped reading Althouse when she turned off the comments. Without a conversation a blog is just a vanity project. Without comments, "news" is just propaganda.
Translation:
We soyboys can't handle the truth.
I myself hide behind a pseudonym. I don't do it to express vile thoughts but to express honest thoughts sans the hedging niceties used in polite discourse. If pseudonyms were good enough for the writers of the Federalist Papers, they should be good enough for the comments to the Journal Sentinel....My innate moral grandeur keeps me from being truly vile, but I find it useful to use a pseudonym when commenting on the meanings of WAP and its import to society at large or whether Taylor Swift should do a cover version. There are some subjects and some thoughts that are profitably discussed in anonymity.... It should also be noted that if large numbers of people think truly vile thoughts about a given subject isn't that information itself as much worth knowing as the report on the subject. You can gauge what's going through the collective unconscious.
Let us not forget, the MJS covered for professional leftist rape pedophile Brett Blomme.
"gilbar said...
seems like this could be shortened to: Journal Sentinel to end
seriously..
How Long? How Long before the layoffs? How Long before the closures? How Long before it's GONE ??"
Well, they already have had layoffs, and the paper is no longer printed in Milwaukee. It's printed in Peoria, IL and trucked up here. Well, maybe not trucked. They may just put them in the trunk of a car.
I see annual subscription offers for $1. They pitch that at the grocery store all the time.
How long? Not long.
I guess if you disagree you can write a letter to the editor like back in 1973? Talk about a step backwards in time. Good luck with this.
Umm, isn't "misogynistic" itself kind of a TERF taunt?
I worked in journalism in 2016. The day after the election a colleague (former WaPo writer) had a hard time accepting what happened. After he got over his shock and could finally talk about it, he said the "first thing" that news sites had to do was to remove comments sections.
These people really do believe "democracy" means that "experts" should lecture voters, and then voters should carry out their orders, preferably with no back talk or unmoderated discussion.
They also block comments on the stories where the readers fact check shitty journalism.
"Nah, I must be missing something here, that seems waaaaaay too easy to implement, to allow continued comments."
You sure are. Let's start with de-banking.
More traffic for Twitter, currently known as X.
There you can block racist, misogynist taunts.
Or as Hillary did to me (true story), block those who call out your hypocrisy and criminality, and do so without ad hominem taunts, just established facts.
Temujin: "jig" is up!?!?
Enough with your racist dog-whistles!
Moderator, please!
The positive impacts of pseudonymity are offset by the high likelihood that the discourse will be overwhelmed at times of crisis through concerted activity by foreign and partisan entities. I wish there were a way to address that problem.
It's an important election year and tickle-me Biden and failing progressive policies are not popular. It wouldn't surprise me if more so-called "newspapers" turn off comments.
No "censorship" tag?
Wait a minute:
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Detroit Free Press and possibly the Detroit News. All are ending their commenting facilities on 1st February, tomorrow?
Is that right? Are there any others? Is it to stifle potentially embarrassing Election Year commentary (and demographics), but on the pretext of 'Hate, Inc'? Was there a memo?
Too Big to Fail, No tactic Too Low to Try
The Left can't deal with Free Speech.
Forty-eight comments so far here, mostly one-liners or me-two comments.
It seems to me that some well-conceived comments would be welcomed anywhere but sadly only comments that match individual worldviews are acceptable by us all.
Ann tried "No Comments" unless presented as emails, but that didn't last long. She abandoned the experiment, I suppose in part because readership declined.
I don't know if many such comment-less sites survived because I don't read them but MJS is a newspaper and news and opinion are the name of the game. And carbon-free newspapers have become the only affordable mechanism remaining. Letters to the Editor and electronic comments do not represent news.
There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
Safe and warm in their hermetically sealed cocoons. Until the next layoffs.
If you can't stand the heat, turn off the comments.
As someone who has been commenting on things under my own name only since 1986, I FULLY support anonymity for anyone who wants it. Although anonymity is easily abused--and often is--the value of allowing people to share information they otherwise would not be able to share and to speak their minds without fear of retaliation is so much greater than the cost of the abuses that anonymity enables.
I don't deny that it sucks to be the recipient of anonymous abuse (particularly dishonest abuse), and the price is paid by a few while the benefits of anonymity are received by many, but that seems to be the cost of freedom of speech.
At times I think that some hybrid system might be the solution, in which people would have anonymity unless they committed actionable defamation, at which time they would be unmasked, but its really hard to figure out how that would work in practical terms. A few people, like Ace of Spades, have been able to keep anonymity when defending against a bogus libel claim, but it appears that was costly and he/she was just very lucky. Also, I am pretty sure I wouldn't trust tech or media companies to maintain anonymity, though I imagine that some kind of pgp 'escrow' system could be created).
I have never been anonymous not because I'm fearless or anything like that, but because I know myself well enough to recognize that anonymity is just too great a temptation to bad behavior (there are some people that I badly want to slap upside the head with a fish--verbally, of course--but that doesn't mean that I should).
The benefit of never being anonymous, I've found, is that I have never had to fear that someone would pierce the anonymity and out my obnoxious behavior to the world: it's already out there!
Which is not to say that I'd be PROUD if certain USENET postings from the late '80s and early '90s were to surface. I was perhaps a tiny bit overly enthusiastic about the New Jersey Devils and just maybe said things that in retrospect might be seen as being unkind about the personal habits and ancestries of the fans of other hockey teams (RANGERSFAN4LIFE, I'm sorry I said those things about your mother, her sisters, and a gopher. I just got a little carried away).
We’ve so far successfully ignored what you, dear readers, have had to say. Going forward, we shall simply cut out the middleman and ignore what you probably would say without your having to go to all that wasted effort in saying it. You’re welcome.
~ The Editors
guitar joe said...
Long overdue. Every newspaper and news outlet should put an end to it. Write letters to the editor, but this endless, gaseous effluvium of opinion is tiresome.
*********
Is someone forcing you to read the comments with your eyelids taped so you can't shut them, as in "Clockwork Orange"?
Who made you the Decider regarding "gaseous effluvia"?
And let's be honest, most of the lefty sites won't let you say what you want.
Case in point: Article on MSN on my home page about "FBI arrests Jan. 6 Rioter IDed with help of facial recognition and a throwback Eagles cap." My submitted comment: "Another political prisoner for the DC Gulag." Rejected with "This comment doesn't meet the community guidelines. Please try again."
I did get "Sorry, Ivan Denisovich" through, though. F*** the censors.
The Milwaukee Journal has lost almost all of its readership over the past 20 years:
https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/featured/the-jay-weber-show/content/2023-10-19-mil-journal-sentinel-has-lost-83-circulation-and-only-5200-pay-on-line/
here's an idea (that they'd NEVER take up)..
Let people use ANY name they want.. BUT; make them be a subscribing reader to comment.
They (obviously!) need money.. They should ENCOURAGE people to subscribe
Gusty Winds- the expression is”TOE the line”.
I'm sorry, Badgers. I really didn't mean to kill your newspaper. If I had known, I would never have taken the call.
I got a call Monday from a journalist wanting to interview me for a story he was writing on pharmaceutical manufacturing and the lack of it in the US. Less than 48 hour later, the story has not even run, and I find the proverbial "cats on the roof and we can't get him down" story. I had no idea my jinx power was so great.
Apologies to all. Sorry for killing your newspaper.
The interview was based on a story I wrote last year about how we have no antibiotic manufacturing in the US (1 small plant in TN, currently(?) closed for regulatory issues). Of the 47 most critical antiviral APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) 97% have no US source and so on. 87% of the most critical generics (lisoprinil, prednisone, albuteral) have no US source. And so on...
Some nice graphics in this article https://www.dcatvci.org/features/the-us-api-manufacturing-base-generics/
That is not my story. Mine is here
https://www.packagingdigest.com/pharmaceutical-packaging/reshore-pharmaceutical-manufacturing-to-puerto-rico
John Henry
In Australia our public broadcasters and free to air broadcasters all disabled comments during the pandemic, and those comment sections have never returned. Our major news site - news.com.au also does not allow comments.
Guess you guys are just catching up to us.
When it comes to tyranny, Australia is no 1 in the Western World, maybe 2nd after New Zealand.
Milwaukee used to be a fun town in the early 1980’s.
Online comments have made me far too aware of the opinions of other people. There was value in having those opinions limited to letters to the editor.
Online is the id-line.
On most news-oriented sites and blogs, comments tend to be predictable, repetitive and uninteresting. I don't read the comments at most blogs because they are so silly. Here at Prof. Althouse's House, one can often find interesting and well thought-out comments, interspersed among the usual teenage nastiness and defensiveness that must be skipped over. Only on a well-moderated blog with established rules, like this one, is it worthwhile to spend time in the comment section. One can occasionally learn something here, unlike other leftwing and rightwing sites that seem to celebrate sameness and juvenile name-calling. Thanks, Professor.
I suggest publishing a "curated" and a non-curated comments section. Those of delicate sensibilities can limit themselves to the "curated" comments.
I would guess that the non-curated comments would be considerably more popular.
Eventually there will be no msm. People will just turn to their favorite commenter on social media, such as Taylor Lorenz, to find things to discuss. Current events will be ephemera. "The Whitehouse" account on X will give us pablum from big brother.
A quick search shows that by 2022, they have lost between 81 and 83% of subscribers, both digital and Sunday edition, and now refuse to answer questions about additional losses.
In other words, death spiral.
I guess they don't want any readers...because the comments are usually the best part of the story. The lies of the Progressive journalists should NEVER be brought to your attention, so if they stop the comments...they promote their lies.
Butkus51 said...
mikee....sure. Lets do it with voting first.
1/31/24, 11:25 AM
THIS^^^^^
Has the readership of places like Hot Air and Red State gotten better or worse since they made banned the plebs from commenting?
"I suggest publishing a "curated" and a non-curated comments section. Those of delicate sensibilities can limit themselves to the "curated" comments.
"I would guess that the non-curated comments would be considerably more popular."
Sure. Stupid, crude, and disruptive is as stupid, crude, and disruptive does.
Look at the comments here. Only a fraction of regular commenters provide comments worth reading or considering.
I see annual subscription offers for $1.
I actually signed up for the local daily paper for six months for ten bucks...and a $10 gift card, so, for free.
I cancelled after a few weeks, because there's hardly any local news or features in it; hell, most of the time, they can't even be bothered with covering local high school sports. No thanks.
P.S. Not that I recommend or would approve such coarse and stupid commenters being banned from commenting. It's educational and valuable to see who is who, if dispiriting to see the low grade of thought and feelings of so many.
It's not anonymous posts they don't like. That's just an excuse, because not allowing anonymous posts would solve that. It's different opinions they don't like.
Has anyone ever read the comments section of the Washington Post? Talk about a cesspool spewing out a single thought from a hive mind.
It's too bad when comments descend to that. (There or here.) But I'm also not so naive as to believe that readers' mouths are shut up for that reason only. Usually it is ideological.
Newspapers: we need clicks for $$$
Also newspapers: the people who click on our stories are despicable
Gunner said...
Has the readership of places like Hot Air and Red State gotten better or worse since they made banned the plebs from commenting?
I dont' know, because I let my VIP Pass lapse, and stopped looking at comments, once they decided to set up their commenters for later doxing (no, I do NOT believe that they will never get hacked.)
Mark said...
"Has anyone ever read the comments section of the Washington Post? Talk about a cesspool spewing out a single thought from a hive mind."
Have you read the features?
Talk about our nations High School Newspaper of Record. "Where decency dies in wokeness"
The author must be a big Nikki Haley fan; she also objects to mean people hiding behind fake names. May they be very happy together in the unemployment line.
For creating a site for sore minds, thank you, Ann.
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