On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"... encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the internet, but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of the readers’ comments that can now be appended online to almost any article tends to diminish most forms of human understanding."
Worth reading for that insight alone.
I don't buy the premise that reader comments have much, if anything, to do with newspaper woes. The internet has thrown newspapers' business model under the bus, but reader comments and other forms of participation have mostly been good developments. Major newspapers have bigger audiences than they ever had even while ad revenue declines, and they have generally been late on the bandwagon for allowing reader comments. At New York Times, for instance, there still aren't comments on regular news articles and comments on editorials and op-eds are (as of pretty recently) curated, meaning that editors can identify and highlight the most insightful comments.
The decline in newspaper quality also started well before the Internet became ubiquitous and had more to do with business-minded editorial decisions than anything else.