Opening hours for newspaper comments
November 22, 2009
How would you feel if I were to say the opening hours for commenting on this blog's posts are from 9am to 3pm?
Recently I came across a link to this screengrab from Norwegian news site Agderposten.no (via @prinsessemarte ), stating that a given article was open for comments between 7am and 9pm. The wording here sounds a bit strange to me, but as far as I know "opening hours" for commenting on newspaper articles are not so uncommon - though this is not always stated so explicity, and is often phrased differently.
Because news sites have editorial responsibility for libellous comments, they have to be moderated pre or post publication, and many news sites will moderate comments continuously during daytime while all comments submitted at night, say between 9-10pm and 7-8am, will be held in a queue until the moderators pick up their job and start approving them in the morning. This for the simple reason that people are more likely to drink and sumbit comments that are libellous, hateful or incoherent during night time (and this is not just a theoretical possibility, from what I've seen at news sites I've worked I suspect the majority of comments submitted during night time are libellous, hateful or incoherent). Personally, I know I have a habit of talking about the social web as a virtual pub, in which context the term opening hours actually makes sense - though I'm not sure how far I should try to stretch that metaphore, certainly people tend to behave very differently in the comment sections of major news sites than what they do on the world wide web at large...
This might seem somewhat odd if you apply the "shop angle" but the reasoning is quite pragmatic.
The "opening hours" principle is actually implemented on the vast majority of Edda Media sites, due to the pre-post moderation of comments.
Empty newsroom - no comments.
Posted by: Tom Erik | November 23, 2009 at 12:16 AM