Writing Hurts

I was pretty surprised by a commercial on the Olympics by shoe-makers Crocs. The site invited users to upload videos about the shoes saying why they loved — or hated — the shoes.

The site has a bunch of videos now, of varying levels of production quality, ranting or raving about Crocs. It’s an unusual idea for a company, to give hate the same billing as love. But it makes sense.

There are a lot of places for people to spew hate on the Internet, so why not try and corral it when you can?

And for newspapers, it’s even more useful. We are — and we should be — polarizing. People will be angry about our editorials and have opinions about our stories. Why not give them a place to talk? It would be useful to find out what people are thinking and what we might need to change.

There will inevitably be the usual trolling: OMG yr paper is teh sux0rz! Die plz. Kthxbai

The Crocs site doesn’t have to deal with that as much, because they set a relatively high bar to entry. But we can igore the useless comments and work on fixing the problems we find. It helps to follow Chip Scanlan’s advice to Be a sponge, be a duck.

So are any papers out there giving people a place to talk specifically about the issues they have with the paper?

There was some flap a couple of weeks ago when news/gossip site Gawker suggested that newspapers stop allowing comments.

The points made are pretty valid: commenters are often rude, off-topic or both. Newspapers would never publish much of what’s said in comments on their editorial pages, and people are allowed to hide behind pseudonyms.

The writer makes the argument that newspapers should be in the news business and blogs should be in the business of trafficking in comments. But that misses the point. Comments, no matter how nasty, are a useful addition to newspaper stories.

Comments are not a conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are lots of ways to have conversations on the Internet, and newspapers are looking to add more all the time. But the gut-level reaction that stories provoke is worth giving its own forum.

Take our recent live coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cedar Rapids.

One person wants to know why we’re bothering, when people could just read about the visit in the next day’s paper. I’ll leave you to absorb the irony of making such a comment on a Web site.

Others spend a lot of time arguing about Obama’s merits,  in sometimes crude terms. But they’d be doing that anyway. We’re just letting those comments take place out in the open.

That’s part of the new mission of the media. We’re not just telling people what’s happening anymore, we need to listen to what they have to say, as well.

We need to do more to foster real conversations and to make sure the trolls don’t take over. But that doesn’t mean we should stop letting people comment on our stories.