Opinion: Google News comments commentary comments

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to give a less-than-full-throated defense of Google. Or maybe it’s just a bad idea to make hyperbolic references to Osama bin Laden. Or both. Anyway, our editorial about Google News’ new comments feature drew a hailstorm of brickbats, starting with this one from Robert Niles at USC’s Online Journalism Review. Niles appears to have miscontrued our position on Google’s impact on publishers; the board has long considered Google a friend to the industry, not a foe, despite what the Association of American Publishers contends. (Niles apparently has forgotten our editorial defending Google Print for Libraries. Of course, that ran back in August 2005.) His headline also suggests that Google is opening its comments section to all readers, which it isn’t; only ‘participants’ in a story are permitted to post there, or so this Google News blog post says.

The OJR piece spurred a number of other blogs to weigh in with their own criticisms, some of them thoughtful, others, well, punchier. For what it’s worth, I think Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp are right when they talk about newspapers needing to shift from presenting news as a fait accompli to providing information platforms that readers can add onto. Here at the Opinion Manufacturing Division, we tried to do that a couple of years ago, with not so good (gulp!) results. Chalk that one up as a rookie mistake, and please bear that episode in mind when you complain about us moderating comments. But I still think it’s worth reminding people what Google is and isn’t doing with the comments feature. It’s a) trying to draw the discussion of stories away from the news sites that provided them (not too hard in the case of the LA Times and many other newspapers, which don’t let readers post comments on the same page as the story that provoked/inspired them), and b) providing a platform for selected people (or, perhaps more accurately, their flaks) to comment without rebuttal from readers outside that group. More information on a topic is a good thing in general, don’t get me wrong. I just hope that Google News readers will remain skeptical of what they read, not just in news stories but in the comments as well.