On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 7:06 PM Steve Timko <steveti...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not just page views. It's creating a sense of community. Newspapers > have lost their connection to the community. > The problem is that it becomes tribal. The different factions of the > political spectrum attack each other, sometimes allying with another > faction against a common enemy. Nevada is a hotbed of Libertarianism and > many of their views (pro-choice, legal drugs, gay rights) directly conflict > with the Christian right. But they will gang up on Socialists. > Casual readers will come in to offer their Two Cents and will find > themselves caught in a gang fight. > In the early days of the internet the big thinkers wrote about the transition of newspapers from print to digital. The old way was to have an article printed on paper. Any corrections or updates would come from a new article on a new day. On the internet, instead of a series of articles, there would be a continuously updating story. The online article was to be a live document and the comments section was to be reader feedback, offering corrections, updates, and opinions on the story. There might be instances where it worked but it certainly never built up to scale in newspapers. I remember posting corrections and updates to articles on an alt weekly's website and seeing them ignored. Comments are only meaningful if the writer of the article joins in the discussion but the writers are spending their time on new articles. I know of one local sports website with a very active comments section but they are subscriber driven and only subscribers can post comments. Since the commenters have demonstrated a commitment to the website the site's writers will join the comment threads. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiEpi5AC0Wdoz-%2BjMX6p0t6Wv%3DY0k2YORbZHOWkGhEY7MA%40mail.gmail.com.
