The New York Times made a pretty good model.

1) Promote and recognize good comments 2) Remove offensive or non-constructive ones

This form of hand curiation sets down rules and expectations which the community at large than reaches for.

If you dont set down rules of course your discussion forums will disolve into petty nonsense. The loudest, dumbest voice always wins in a shouting match merely by employing a denial-of-ground strategy.

Unfortunately our editor's response to everything is "it's a staffing problem."

Our newsroom, if you want to call it that, spends most of the day re-writing (fluffing) press releases to get a paper out the next day.

Corporate has our system lock down, we don't have access to our database tables and responses to feature requests, like comment promotion, are usually..."We'll bring that up in a meeting."

In my opinion people tend to feed their ego behind a keyboard. A lot of people bite their tongue in face to face conversations, only a few will speak out and make their opinions heard.

Maybe some kind of pay-wall for us would be a possible tool against trolling.

Thank you for your reply.

No, it's an architecting problem.

You should be able to leverage trust and quality recognition within your own userbase. If you can't find trusted users to seed the comment moderation system, well, you've got other issues as well.

But if the site's founders/leaders can start federating trust at least to the extent of promoting/muting content, then it most certainly isn't a staffing problem, beyond coding the necessary algorithms.

We have a report abuse button that is attached to each comment, all our users have to do is click it and it sends an email to the appropriate person for moderation. (This is rarely used unfortunately)

To be honest I don't agree with a lot of the decisions corporate makes in regards to our digital efforts. They are on the other side of the country and believe that if it works in their market it has to work in ours.

It constantly feels like we are playing catch-up to everyone else.

I keenly understand the situation you are in as a former journalist myself. The simple fact of the matter is that such a significant generational divide exists in the newsroom, coupled with an underlying hatred from the old-guard for how their profession has been forced to adapt, that I completely gave up any hope of change.

I was not going to change the editors mind who believed IT took care of itself and most of it was just 'magic' -- that outsourcing tech to a low-cost vendor who provided no follow up support or update would ultimately doom the product -- and that ultimately the product of 'News' was more about the medium of tech than the news itself.

If they can't read it, you aren't making money. I was tired of skeptical questions and blank stares from managing editors who laughed at the idea of 'reading news on your phone' and thought 'code monkeys' didn't really understand the news and should stay in the basement while the experienced journalists did the real work.

I've consulted National Geographic, CNN, the New York Times, and several others about their digital futures and I have never met clients that were so stubborn, confused, and self-desceptive in my life. The one that took the cake of course was National Geographic, who refused to believe that video would supplant a large portion of their photographic work in the coming years. They also stated that they did not believe people would want to consume 'low resolution' images on a screen compared to their quality printing process.

The NYT built my idea, which became TimesCast -- kudos for that. And CNN generally stays on top of most things from an IT perspective.

It is very frustrating to have to deal with these types of attitudes.

My supervisor was around when this paper got their website up and running (late 90's) and he remembers people around here saying that the internet was just a fad it was never going to catch on. Fast forward to today and most of them are scrambling trying to figure out what to do.

Hear hear!

It seems like forever that I've wanted either Facebook or curated comments on my local paper's site, SFGate.com

I'm at the point now where I won't click on a link or read a story on SFGate -- I will go an seek out another news source which carries that story if possible. The net effect of having such a cesspool of comments beneath whatever I'm reading is that it makes me I'm participating in a community of scumbags.

I'd rather read the Economist or NY Times, where the comments seem informed.

Facebook integration would be great on our site, at least that way we could put a face(no pun intended) to each comment.

I feel you on the whole scumbag thing, I go through our website and check the comments everyday and am blown away by what my neighbors are saying.

I understand that anonymity is important but if you want to make real changes sooner or later someone has to show their face. Just my opinion.

Newspaper issue is interesting. One of the local newspapers had all sorts of vibrant debate, including a lot of discussion of which cops were corrupt, which businesses were cheating people, and which pastors were lurking at the man garden in the local park. This was intolerable to the highly connected newspaper owner, so they required all commenters be validated by phone before commenting and use their real name. Comments went down to zero. Not 1/4, actually zero. The forums have no comments at all now.

In order to have more accountability you need to have less anonymity, and that is not something commenters on newspaper sites are willing to give up.

I'm not sure what you mean by accountability regarding these examples. Do you mean the ability of the corrupt police to track down and punish the people who outted their crimes?

What I was trying to get across is that commenters should own up and stand by their words and not hide behind the keyboard.

Amazing. So the journalists at your newspaper obviously do not protect their confidential informants, since this is your policy.

There is an extremely long history of what happens to whistle blowers and it isn't pretty. Do you deny that outting government, police and corporate corruption is dangerous and anonymity is often necessary to do so without one's self and family being exposed to great harm? What newspaper do you work for again?

Woah, I didn't say all that. We are a small newspaper and I really doubt we have informants.

Like I said before our "newsroom" doesn't do much reporting other than sitting in on Town Hall meetings and reporting on press releases, our police department isn't very cooperative with us.

I believe anonymity is important especially when someones life can potential be put in harms way. I believe this is why we have witness protection.

My frustrations are about the commenters who would rather spread hate than ideas or engage in friendly debate.