Observer Interactive

Read Comments (Or Not)

By Jason on 06/10/2009 – 12:08 pm in productrelease

There are many articles on newspaper sites and user comments, and this entry’s purpose is not to debate the sides. CharlotteObserver.com has comments, and we believe the future of news is interactive and uses two-way communication.

The purpose of this entry is to state that the readers of The Charlotte Observer’s site now have a choice about viewing the comments.

Like reading what your fellow Charlotteans have to say in comments? Do nothing.

Not so sure you want to read comments written under our articles? Now you can do something about that if you like.

Today, Observer Interactive is rolling out the ability to show or hide story comments. We have not done a ton of research, but we believe we may be the only media outlet doing something like this… but again, not exhaustive searching. (UPDATE: as seen in comments, I’ve been corrected — thanks Dean.)

To hide comments, you have three choices:

  1. When you create a new account, simply check the box in the registration form stating you’d prefer not to see comments.
  2. Log in to your current account and check the same box mentioned above.
  3. On an article page, simply click “hide comments,” regardless of if you’re a site member.

See something you’d like to see comments on? Simply click on “show comments” on a story and you’re back. Go back and forth any time.

How it looks at page bottom:

picture-22

Choice. It’s a good thing.

Thank you for your continued feedback,

-Jason

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  • droberts
    Hey Angie! How are things going? @Jason: I used to work with Angie at The State.
  • Jason
    Hi Angie! Thanks for letting me know -- good to see others commenting here and sharing what they've done. I'm getting happier about my caveat by the day :)

    Curious, how'd you hear about this all the way in Portland?
  • The Portland Press Herald's Web site, pressherald.com, also has been letting readers choose whether to see comments for nearly a year now. We've gotten very positive feedback on being able to have the option. (I'm online editor there.)
  • Jason
    @Dean -- ha! That's why I put the caveat in there. I didn't look at chron.com, but good to see other people listening to the users. Thank you for sharing and your comment.


    @Gary -- user requests, mostly. I get 100s of e-mails/month specifically about doing this or that on the site, and patterns are pretty easy to identify. While there are not a LOT of people who want this, the people who do have a valid use case: they come to read the story, and they are more interested in that than the user comments. Other users that like our comments have the same reasoning, just in reverse.


    If technology can allow this type of choice, we always will want to listen.
  • The Houston Chronicle's Web site, chron.com, lets its users hide comments (I'm the content director there), as do the regional Gannett sites, like dmregister.com.
  • Interesting, Jason. Can you share some of the thinking that drove the decision to develop this feature?
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