Month: December 2013

What are your thoughts on tweaking comments?

I’m thinking of making a tweak to commenting on Media Nation. Rather than requiring real names, first and last, as I have since 2010, I might shift to requiring online verification instead.

There’s a function I can turn on that would require people to sign in using their Facebook, Twitter, WordPress or Google Plus account before commenting. I would still screen comments before posting them. But no longer would I be tracking people down to remind them to use their full names — something that causes me to lose a fair number of comments.

Most of the commenting energy has shifted to Facebook anyway. (If you don’t follow the conversation when I post a Media Nation link on Facebook, you’re missing a lot. You can follow my public feed by clicking here.) But I feel like I need to give the on-site comments a jolt.

A word about Facebook: If you comment on Media Nation using your Facebook account, your comment will not appear anywhere on Facebook. It’s simply a log-in mechanism. Still, I have no doubt that Facebook tracks you for its own internal advertising purposes.

As for the alternatives, logging in with WordPress is probably the most benign. WordPress is part of a nonprofit organization and it’s not a social network, at least not in the sense that the other three are. You can sign up for an account without having to start a blog. If you’re comfortable posting comments in public, then you shouldn’t have any problem registering with WordPress.

Thoughts?

Correction: WordPress.com’s owner, Automattic, is in fact a for-profit company. See this comment.

Michael Calderone on what to expect from Carolyn Ryan

One of the first media pieces I ever wrote for The Boston Phoenix, in the mid-1990s, was on the shrinking Statehouse press corps. Among those I interviewed was a young reporter for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy named Carolyn Ryan.

Ryan went on to great success at the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She was recently named the Times’ Washington bureau chief, and Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post has written about what to expect. An excerpt:

Ryan … has managed large reporting staffs in New York and Boston and is known inside the paper as a fierce competitor who sets high expectations. Such attributes can benefit the the Times’ Washington operation, which appears to be stepping up efforts against Politico and others in driving the political conversation of the day. Ryan may help ward off the complacency that news outlets long at the top of the media pecking order can sometimes fall prey to.

Quite a rise for Ryan, a hard-working, talented journalist. She deserves this moment, and I have no doubt she’ll make the most of it.

‘Variable tolling’: A new way of sticking it to drivers

The Boston Globe’s editorial page today endorses a terrible idea: tolls that rise or fall depending on the time of day and the amount of traffic congestion. The editorial describes “variable tolling” as “a technology that keeps traffic manageable by raising prices during busy periods, thus giving drivers an incentive to use the highway at other times.”

Well, I’m fortunate enough to be able to drive off-peak most of the time, so I would be able to take advantage of those low rates. But the vast majority of drivers do not have that luxury.

Far better to improve public transportation so that people have a positive incentive to get out of their cars. Sadly, the transit system gets worse and worse. The carrot is gone, and the stick grows longer.