Pam, I certainly can't speak for Jack, but I can tell you how I understood his remarks. If I understood him accurately,, he believes that in general, the KNS is doing a good job managing its comments and commenters, and he believes that the online community represented in the KNS comments appearing below most of their online stories is healthy, diverse and a valuable contribution to our overall community discourse. He believes that anonymity for commenters on his site offers a number of valuable benefits.

But again, that was just my understanding of his input on this issue based on the brief round table discussion during the Inside TN taping this week.

-Katie

I don't know how you can effectively offer criticism to journalists. I don't know what the psychology is, but in my experience, journalists are even more prone to retrench and defend than are politicians, when challenged.

I think on the show that Katie pointed out that the KNS comments just aren't well moderated in an era of tight staffing, and that they clearly lack the resources to keep up with it. Jack's response was to say that comment moderation received significant staffing resources. To me that suggests continued obliviousness to a terrible mis-allocation of staff time. He also, with ironic pride, cited some significant volume of text produced in the KNS comments, which I assume dwarfs the text produced by actual staff or freelance journalists.

When will Jack et al. realize that they could find far more value for their business in old-school journalism than in trying desperately to keep up with "social media?" If KNS shut down their comments and used the staff resources to put more journalists out there writing copy that gets reviewed by editors and published, they would greatly enhance their position as a reliable source of information.

There's a low bar to being a source for online opinion and reader commentary, particularly when the tone that exists in KNS comments is considered acceptable. There's a much higher bar to being a source for straight-up journalism that follows standards for finding, verifying, and publishing reliable information that is of public value and interest. The only thing that old-school journalism really has to cede to new media is the idea of always being first with a story. The value that remains is being consistently accurate. If the KNS put all their effort into that, they'd be able to get eyes on ads and even to find more paying subscribers.

So long as they continue defending their failed experiment in moderating the raw sewage that is their comments function, they'll continue to see their revenues and profits dwindle, and that's sad.