On comments on news sites

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Jan. 12, 2009, 1:06 p.m.

On Friday, I sat in on the panel of commentators on Beat the Press, the weekly media-criticism show on Boston’s public television station WGBH. One of the topics: comments on news sites, and how news organizations should deal with troublesome commenters. Here’s eight minutes of our discussion, featuring Dan Kennedy, Joe Sciacca, and my colleague Callie Crossley.

One quick note. Joe, at about 4:20, shares an unfortunate conventional wisdom among media lawyers: that a news organization’s moderation of comments opens it up to massive legal liability. That conventional wisdom is, in all but a few very uncommon cases, false. More on that on Wednesday.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Jan. 12, 2009, 1:06 p.m.

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