A Kentucky paper’s pre-Internet reader comments

April 5, 2009 by Kurt · View Comments
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. Read more

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