Really interesting article in yesterday’s NYT Magazine on the value (or lack thereof) of reader-posted comments to news websites. The author makes her case that reader generated comments are nothing more than the rehashed rants of the fringe who don’t really read the post but instead use the comments section as a forum to posit their own views. The example that she uses to anchor that case is that of Anne Applebaum, an American journalist living in Poland who writes regularly for The Washington Post and Slate.

Ms. Applebaum has received a boatload of accolades over the years for her work, including a recent moniker by Foreign Policy magazine as “one the world’s most sophisticated thinkers” and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for her book on the Gulag. However, if one were to judge her solely by her reader-posted comments on the Washington Post, one would conclude that she is a know-nothing “stooge and liar” who in the process of being slammed daily is also often patronizingly referred to as ‘sweetie” and “dear.”

In a world where every blog and web site yearns wistfully for comments to its published content, this piece serves up an interesting debate about the real value of such “user-contributed” comments.

Surely the case can be made for the merits of user-generated comments – look at Yelp and the readers reviews on travel sites which by and large solicit and aggregate comments from others who have visited the same store, eaten at the same restaurant, etc. Ditto sites like Sears’ My SKU.com which organized a site for the purpose of capturing feedback about its stores and its merchandise and P&Gs VocalPoint which has become an important online forum for consumers to express their opinions about P&G branded products.

What’s different though, I believe, is the affinity that these readers/visitors have with the core brand – and each other. Sites like Yelp are more than online channels, they are communities of people who have a stake in the information that they are posting – either because at some point they will consume the information that others produce (and so want balanced and credible information) or because they trust that the brand sponsor of the site will listen and take action. In both cases, the sites have created an environment where user engagement is possible and incentives for people to participate on the basis of mutual trust and value exchange. Open news site, like the Washington Post, have not been as successful. This point is underscored by the author’s observation that Slate, an online property where Ms. Applebaum also appears regularly, is a registration only site which still carries some of the same reader-generated “baggage” but not to the same degree as the Washington Post site. Even the simple act of having to register on a site appears to change the dynamics - and therefore the associated responsibilities of being a value-added member of that community.

For me, this piece reinforced how difficult it really is to create community and how the mere act of adding a “comments” section – and having commentators does not make a community. It’s not such a hard concept to grasp. Perhaps if the newspaper industry had stumbled onto that nuance a while back, they would not be bleeding the red ink that they are today (or serving as the online hosts of the loudmouth fringe who, if anything, disincent people to belong).