Published July 14, 2010

When it comes to online comments, WBUR was late to the game. We didn’t allow them on wbur.org until April 2009 — and by then many news organizations had rethought comments altogether. A few news sites and numerous blogs have relaunched without any comments.

The Sun Chronicle, a newspaper in Attleboro, is trying something novel: Would-be commenters must pay a one-time fee of 99 cents to verify their identity.

Should this guy be allowed to comment? (Scott Beale/Flickr)

“This is not about the revenue,” said publisher Oreste D’Arconte. As Curt Nickisch reported, D’Arconte said it’s about reducing the workload for his editors, who spent hours policing comment threads.

Only a small handful of people have signed up at this point, and the complaints are already rolling in — including on our own website. “Perhaps we should further reduce the burden on the newspaper’s editors by no longer reading their paper,” writes “J,” who I suspect would not want his identity revealed at thesunchronicle.com.

It’s a dilemma for news organizations. We all want to be more accessible and interactive. And comments are a no-brainer. But we don’t want to create barriers to interaction.

I talked about this on Radio Boston last month  with Boston Globe writer Neil Swidey, who interviewed some of the most prolific commenters in the polluted backchannels of Boston.com. In that conversation I talked about some ways news organizations can immediately improve the quality of comments:

• Get the journalists involved in the discussion
• Moderate, moderate, moderate — nasty comments set the tone like a snowball rolling downhill
• Require an account, or at least a real e-mail address

At wbur.org, we do the first two. For whatever reason — our online audience is smarter, our traffic lighter? — I can count on two hands the number of times we had to get involved in a thread. (It did get ugly yesterday on David Boeri’s piping plover story.)

We have received a lot of meaningful — anonymous — comments on news stories that we might not have gotten otherwise. Then again, we don’t publish stories without bylines. What do you think? Would you pay a small fee to get access to comments?