Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, but online news sites are now less interested in giving readers’ a chance to voice it.
That’s the view of Press Council chair Professor Julian Disney, who said cautious publishers were increasingly limiting the number of articles they opened for reader comments because of abusive posts.
Professor Disney said there had been a notable decline in the number of ‘open’ articles compared to two years ago.
“The quality of comments that are being received on a lot of streams have led newspapers to just not open them on many articles,” he said.
“There are some topics which editors say, ‘we know what we will get if we open a comment stream’– and that means that those who wanted to comment on that topic in a responsible way cannot do it, because of the excesses and abuses of other people.
“It is a classic example where overshoot means freedom of speech has been limited, because editors – for understandable reasons in my view – have just said, ‘look it’s not worth it for us, it’s spoiling the brand’.”
Nearing four years in the peak media regulation role, Professor Disney said his comments were based on an internal check about a year ago, as well as talking with editors directly.
But Fairfax Media’s digital production managing editor Carlos Monteiro said the aim of its news sites was to expand audience engagement by increasing the number of comments published.
“We have not dropped the number – in fact, there has been a substantial increase since our new Comment section was launched last March,” Mr Monteiro said.
“Our commenting volume is a monthly average of 85,000 comments approved and posted across the five masthead news websites.”
“Our goal is to lift this to 150,000-plus a month and enable full reader participation around the clock and on weekends,” Mr Monteiro said.
Rob Ashton, a comment moderator for Fairfax Media’s five metropolitan news websites including canberratimes.com.au, said he had seen no move to opening fewer articles to reader comments.
But some types of articles were not worth opening to public input.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/are-news-sites-restricting-readers-comments-20130815-2rybj.html#ixzz2c5GIG47w
