Comments on articles

At The Dallas Morning News we're preparing to launch a tool that allows people to comment on articles. Many, many other news organizations have done this already, so we're late to the game.

On the plus side, that gives us some real world experience on which to base our expectations for what will happen when we let our users in to converse. Here's a great post on Poynter about the experiences of other newspaper companies discovered by Belo TV station WVEC news manager Pete McElveen.

Washingtonpost.com's model is one we'll be mirroring:

We have a profanity filter that catches basic stuff, but besides that, we deal with issues after publication. Every comment has a "report abuse" link to allow readers to help us identify problems, and we have staff that helps deal with problematic subjects such as local crime, politics, etc. We also keep a close eye on all stories played off the home page.