A Kentucky paper’s pre-Internet reader comments

April 5, 2009 by Kurt
Filed under: commenting 
David Greer

David Greer

Reader comments existed before the Internet. And David E. Greer knew how to make the most of them — using an answering machine and a printing press. Below, he tells us his experience, which I thought could teach us something about reader comments today.

Greer, now member services director for the Kentucky Press Association, shared his story in an e-mail after reading my piece on story comments in the last edition of the ASNE’s The American Editor.  He allowed me to publish an edited version of his comments here.

* * *

In 1990, I had just been named editor of The News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, a 16,000-circulation daily in Elizabethtown, Ky., 45 miles south of Louisville. It’s home to Fort Knox, in a county with 100,000 residents, making it Kentucky’s fourth most populous county.

I came into the job with a few years experience as a reporter and editor at smaller papers. Along the way, I had also done talk radio in the 1970s during Watergate. This, of course, was long before talk radio became real popular.

At The News-Enterprise, I kept getting readers who called me on the phone and just wanted to talk about local issues, politics — stuff that you might hear discussed on talk radio. Lacking any other easy outlet, my readers would call me. So, I got the idea of putting a transcript of some of their calls in the paper with my written response in boldface printed under the reader comments.

I dubbed it The Editor’s Hot Line. We had an unused phone line in the newsroom. I went to Radio Shack and bought an answering machine. We published the phone number and told readers they could call the line and leave their recorded comments — without their name — and we’d consider publishing some in the new Editor’s Hot Line column.

Unexpected popularity

At first, I envisioned a weekly column. But the volume of calls made it necessary to run an Editor’s Hot Line column four times the first week. It became a daily feature on the opinion page the next week! I didn’t comment on every call but probably at least half.

Readers loved it. But it was very controversial. Community leaders hated that there was no attribution on the calls. But I reasoned that you could call any talk radio station and give a fake name and no one would know the difference.

I developed a 16-point guideline for what kind of calls we’d publish and what we wouldn’t. I published the guidelines daily, along with the calls. A newsroom clerk transcribed the calls and only two people — the assistant editor and me — were authorized to edit the column. No one else. Ever. Period.

Some topics were prohibited. No election-related calls. When the first wet-dry election in 40 years came up, no calls on that either — just letters to the editor. After the third or fourth year, a very detailed readership survey by an outside entity showed the Editor’s Hot Line to be the single most read item in our paper — with 75 percent saying they read it several times a week. It scored higher than the obits.

Varying opinions about the ‘Hot Line’

Within the company that owned the paper, Landmark Community Newspapers, some editors thought I was a genius. Others thought I was the village idiot for running anonymous comments. I heard the phrase, “well, in journalism school I was always taught… ” so many times that I thought I’d puke.

A story was published in Columbia Journalism Review. The editorial page editor of the Arkansas Gazette and others were quoted as saying how irresponsible this was. Of course, they’d never read the column, or the strict editing guidelines, and had no idea about the many comments didn’t use. Sure, people libeled other folks and businesses every day, but those comments were never published.

I note with some horror now that so many papers let the reader comments go unchallenged and unedited online and horrible and vile things are said daily. It’s hard for me personally to feel good about a newspaper that allows such awful things to be published online.

Over the years I had the Editor’s Hot Line, I think I cleared up a lot of misunderstandings from readers about stories because we published their comments. When they were critical of something in the paper, and I could explain right then and there what the facts were and why we made the decisions we did.

But there was also a tremendous entertainment element to the column and so many people commented on that aspect of it. I was polite, but snarky in many of my comments. It made me a local celebrity in our market — which at times was neat and sometimes a real pain in the butt.

But it made people read our paper and talk about our paper a lot. I see that missing from so many papers today. And the smaller ones often have no one on staff regarded as a local celebrity. What a pity.

Couldn’t catch on elsewhere

In 1998, eight years after starting the column, I moved to a sister paper to become publisher. The next editor didn’t really get the Hot Line column and seldom responded to callers and it just kept getting smaller and smaller. Finally that editor left and the next one just killed it off. By then, my publisher had also left the paper and with no champions for the concept, it finally died in about 2001 or so.

Too bad, too, because readers absolutely dug it. The paper was never challenged legally by anything published. Complaint calls were few and far between. We wore out four answering machines from 1990 to 1998.

I like the online reader comments, but why won’t editors put them in the paper where readers would find them fascinating? Based on my experience, it sure seems like a great opportunity lost. Lost probably “because when I was in J-school, I was always taught….”

* * *

Greer couldn’t recall all 16 of the guidelines he published each day with “The Editor’s Hot Line.” These are the 14 he remembered:

  1. No libelous comments will be published.
  2. If you have a complaint about a business, call that business to resolve the problem. No complaint calls about businesses will be published.
  3. No profanity will be tolerated.
  4. At election time, no political comments about candidates will be published. If you want to make a comment about a political issue, that’s fine, but nothing about individual candidates. Save those for a signed letter to the editor.
  5. Nothing in poor taste or offensive will be published.
  6. Keep your comments to 45 seconds or less. Longer comments will be subject to editing, if published.
  7. Comments about public officials, public figures and elected officials and the jobs they are doing are OK provided you don’t violate one of the other editing guidelines.
  8. Comments about content published in our newspaper are fair game too.
  9. No rumors will be published.
  10. Not all comments received will be published.
  11. All editing decisions made by the editor about Hot Line comments received are final.
  12. When appropriate, the editor will respond to a caller’s comment.
  13. This is not a joke service. Please do not call and leave jokes. They will not be published.
  14. Callers do not have to leave their name when recording a comment.

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