Know comment

Recently my colleague forwarded an email to me titled “Newsrooms are taking comments seriously again.”

“This looks worthy of a read,” she wrote, pointing to this article from NiemanLab.

It seems many media outlets are rethinking the decisions they made in the 2010s to shut down their comments sections. At that time, many argued, their earnest attempts at reader engagement had devolved into a “a noisy, thankless place to spend your time, where bile and bad-faith arguments too often drowned out any genuine discussion or personal connection.”

But a decade later, the piece goes on, “something surprising is happening: Reader comments are having a mini renaissance. After years of chasing social media engagement and being burned in the process, publishers have realized that commenting has a tangible value — to the broader public, yes, but also in terms of advertising and subscription revenue.”

Any reader of Michigan Today could have told them that. And we don’t even have advertising or subscription revenue. Case in point: This 2010 story about a notorious Doors concert in 1967 inspired a reader to post the 97th comment in September 2025. And it was in response to a fellow alumnus and Doors fan who had commented years prior. No bile and bad-faith arguments here … just a lot of speculation about  Jim Morrison’s tolerance for mind-altering substances.

More recently, I heard from an elderly alumna’s caregiver whose client had seen her college roommate’s name in the comments section and was hoping to track her down. I was able to reconnect the ladies, now in their 90s.

Light my fire

Over the years I’ve been excoriated by commenters for making grammatical errors and other mistakes. Apparently a headline inspired by Bo Diddley’s “Who do you love” should have read “Whom,” and there’s no worse crime than saying someone is on a “temporary hiatus,” since a hiatus by its very nature is temporary.

Sometimes the discourse gets dicey and the personal insults start to fly. But the beauty of the Michigan Today audience is that it tends to self-correct. And at their best, commenters add contextual details, trivia, history, and emotional resonance to a published piece.

It’s encouraging to see outlets like the Washington Post, Financial Times, and Wired getting back in the comments game, experimenting with subscriber-only models, moderated platforms, and the promise of interacting directly with reporters and writers.

The article’s author Ben Whitelaw, who led the team moderating comments for The Times of London as its former communities editor, speculates about the recent shift.

“It might have taken the disappearance of digital advertising dollars, readers getting used to paywalls, social media becoming a cesspit, and the introduction of new powerful AI tools,” he writes, “but publishers are finally coming to realize that the best community has always been right under their noses.”

My sentiments exactly.