Statistics. Politics. Twitter. De. 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments. The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better.
I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes. So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.) Forrester Ladder 2010. Misreading Tehran: The Twitter Devolution - By Golnaz Esfandiari. Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts that were commenting on the events in Tehran and asked me if I knew the identities of the contributors.
I told her I did, but she seemed disappointed when I told her that one of them was in the United States, one was in Turkey, and the third -- who specialized in urging people to "take to the streets" -- was based in Switzerland. Perhaps I shattered her dreams of an Iranian "Twitter Revolution. " The Western media certainly never tired of claiming that Iranians used Twitter to organize and coordinate their protests following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's apparent theft of last June's elections.
Even the American government seemed to get in on the act.