There’s no doubt that The Kansas City Star, being a link in the debt-laden McClatchy newspaper chain, is operating under significant financial constraints.
But one area in which a relatively small investment could pay big dividends is online reader comments.
Unfortunately, The Star took steps several years ago that had the effect of discouraging reader comments, and it has never made a serious effort since then to build a workable system. That apparent lack of interest and initiative has had two big, negative impacts.
First, it has made online subscriptions — where the paper’s future seems to lie — less appealing. At this stage, if online subscriptions are not growing by leaps and bounds, The Star is in deeper trouble than it appears. (For the record, I don’t know how The Star is doing in regard to online subscriptions, but I haven’t talked to a lot of people who have signed on.)
Second, The Star’s abdication on reader comments makes the paper less relevant than it would otherwise be. As the community’s single strongest information source, The Star could establish itself — with the hiring of two or three people — as the authoritative moderator of responsible discussion on important community issues. That would not only raise the paper’s much-diminished community profile, it would also attract a lot more online subscriptions.
…It’s not fair to compare The Star or, for that matter, any other American daily with The New York Times, but it’s nevertheless interesting to point out the amazing success The Times has had with its online reader-comment system.
Bassey Etim
The Times began enabling comments 10 years ago. The Times now receives about 12,000 comments per day. Every one of those comments is read and either approved or rejected by a 13-member “community desk” headed by Bassey Etim, who has been with The Times since 2008.
It is not uncommon for a big story to get more than 1,000 comments. Today, for example, the lead story in the online edition — a news analysis speculating about how many casualties there might be in the event of a limited war on the Korean peninsula — has attracted more than 1,000 comments.
(At random, I looked at seven KC Star online stories this afternoon and saw a total of six comments. A majority of the comments — four — were on a Kansas City Royals story.)
By virtue of its comments system, The Times has become the de facto clearinghouse on national discourse. Sometimes I will read scores of comments on a single story and spend much more time on the comments than on the story that generated the comments.
In a 2013 story in The New Yorker magazine, a writer named Maria Konnikova reflected on the psychology of online comments, saying they contribute to the reading experience and prompt many readers to want to engage each other on the topic at hand. She added:
In a phenomenon known as shared reality, our experience of something is affected by whether or not we will share it socially. Take away comments entirely, and you take away some of that shared reality, which is why we often want to share or comment in the first place. We want to believe that others will read and react to our ideas.
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Now, I have no evidence whatsoever that The Times’ well-oiled comments system has contributed to its amazing success with sale of digital subscriptions — it is up to 1.9 million news subscriptions, after starting at zero in 2011 — but I have to think it has.
It just makes sense to me that many people, when they read other people’s comments, want to chime in, and I think the combination of getting a good news product (which The Star is) and then being able to weigh in on various issues is a powerful marketing combination.
I understand why The Star changed its approach to comments several years ago, banning anonymous comments and requiring that commenters be registered on Facebook. The trolls, particularly those with a racial ax to grind, were overrunning the comments and making them unreadable. (As an example of a horrible comments system, where anonymous comments are not only accepted but encouraged, check out Tony Botello’s local blog.)
All things considered, I think The Star is missing a golden opportunity. Over the last year, under still relatively new publisher Tony Berg, The Star has hired several young reporters and has done a complete and successful makeover of its editorial page. It wouldn’t take much of an investment — maybe $100,000 to $150,000 a year — to establish its own “community desk.” A few good hands could keep the trolls squarely under the bridges and trigger invigorating dialogue on any number of issues.
Consider, for example, how interesting and intellectually stimulating it would be to get a wide variety of local views on the prospect of a single terminal at KCI — or the resolution of Brandon Ellingson case, or Kelsey Ryan’s Sunday story about Kansas City being a “murder capital.”
I tell you, it could enliven and uplift the entire community. And it could sell a lot of online subscriptions.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
The whole online KC Star experience is becoming worse and worse. The Royals are playing on the west coast. I watched most of the game, but went to bed before the end. Checked the MLB app in the middle of the night and saw they won. Checked the Star app on my phone after 8 am this morning and no game story. Just checked the Star app on my phone now again and no game story. There is a game story on kansascity.com though.
There is a major inconsistency in Star marketing and online strategy here. They push in the paper (and in an email exchange I had about 2 years with the reader rep about having late stores appear in the paper) about using their apps/online, yet increasingly I find no correlation between what is printed and what is online or in their apps. Several times over the past few days the phone app has offered no more 10-15 stories total. And the top stories of the day in the paper (front page) are most days nowhere to be found in the apps.
Everything appears to be being done on the cheap which gives the impression the whole McClatchy operation is nearing financial exhaustion.
Now on the positive, my actual paper delivery has dramatically improve since the first of July which I suspect means a new carrier has assumed our route. I now am getting the paper before 7 am (even on Sunday) when 8 to 9:30 am delivery was becoming routine again.
From a friend on FB “In the proofreader/copy editor gaffe of the decade, the July, 6, 2017 edition of the Kansas City Star Obituaries column sadly informed us of the death of “NAME, NAME”. No mention was made of any pending services”
Fitz, I personally like the idea of never letting anyone hide behind anonymity. The ability to post could be tied to the person’s digital account. That said, once again The Star is hamstrung by the dinosaurs of the past. Many, many, many people were blocked from commenting when they had the audacity to confront The Star’s psychotic public editor on his various and sundry lies. The first step Mr. Berg should take is to override anyone blocked prior to his tenure at The Star.
I do disagree however with having comments censored unless they’re disrespectful of another commenter. Faulty ideas are not defeated by forcing them to fester in the darkness, only by confronting them with their irrationality can we move forward. And, if you can’t defeat them logically and rationally, why the hell are you censoring them to begin with? I would argue that both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement pretty much came to a halt when they successfully shouted down voices of dissent.
Overall, I think you’re correct, allowing people to comment freely would give then a sense of ownership in the paper and bring more people on board. As it is, no one really needs to subscribe given the many ways to skirt paywalls. Another motivator would be to let the subscribers run an ad blocker to eliminate the variety of annoying ads one has to hurdle simply to read a story.