NPR to end website comments

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Users of NPR’s website will no longer be able to comment on story pages starting next week, the network announced Wednesday.

NPR has allowed comments on its site for eight years, but after “much experimentation and discussion, we’ve concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org stories are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users,” said Scott Montgomery, NPR’s managing editor for digital news, in a post on NPR’s site. (It had drawn over 100 comments as of this afternoon.)

NPR will cut off the comments Tuesday. Numerous sites have already removed comment sections, which can become hotbeds of spam, trolling and abusive language toward authors, especially women and people of color. A Guardian study of its comments found that of the 10 writers most abused by commenters, eight were women and two were black.

NPR said it is making the change partly because only a small number of readers actually comment. The site had 79.8 million users in the last three months, Montgomery pointed out, and only 2,600 left a comment each month.

Last month, the site received 491,000 comments, and all those comments aren’t cheap, according to NPR Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen in a post discussing the change. The commenting system “gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted,” she wrote in the post.

Meanwhile, more than 5 million people engage with NPR on Twitter each month, she added.

“Seeing the current sorry state of NPR.org commenting, I support the move to end comments,” Jensen wrote. “I am also disappointed. The vast majority of NPR-produced shows no longer even run snippets of letters from listeners; this latest move seems like a step backward, as understandable as it is. So I hope NPR will make good on the promises that newer engagement options will be tried out.”

Because NPR uses the third-party platform Disqus for commenting, comments on all articles will be removed when commenting is discontinued, Jensen wrote.

In lieu of comments, Montgomery said, NPR will continue to engage with its audience on social media and through projects like the Tiny Desk Contest. Soon it will also begin using the Hearken platform, which solicits questions from readers for an organization’s reporters to answer. Member stations and other media outlets use Hearken as well, including Current. NPR will use it on its Goats and Soda blog and may expand it further.

Correction: An earlier version of this post inaccurately stated that NPR’s website received 33 million comments in July. There were 491,000. The post was also updated to clarify that 2,600 people left a comment in each of the last three months. 

27 thoughts on “NPR to end website comments

  1. “Now we tell you what to think. No need for the proles to have any way to rebuff of discuss what we say.”

    Seems to be a startling trend coming from the left. If it’s not their brand of speech, it’s not right.

    Yet they have no problem calling traditionalists or conservatives fascists. The irony.

  2. So why should I visit the NPR site when there will be no entertaining comments from the public? How is this decision supposed to bring value to the public, which public media wants support from?

  3. As soon as NPR got the comments section closed, it began a purge of its news archives. Good-bye to anything with Second Amendment, NRA, Bloomberg, and so on.

    This tips its hand as to what the discontinuance was about. Its bias was repeatedly getting exposed with facts by commenters.

    Example: it ran a piece on a “grassroots” movement of mothers against guns. In just a couple of hours she was exposed as the president of a PR firm in the employ of a billionaire anti-gun proponent in the comments.

    And it was getting attention on Capitol Hill.

    The rest of their excuses are eye wash.

          • I spent a half hour perusing your citation.

            All articles dealing with his role as the major funder of anti-gun groups is gone.

            Yes, the ordinary non-controversial material in the news archives at NPR remain.

            No, the materials that were the source of accusations of a bias and a definable narrative are gone, and not just with Bloomberg.

          • By naming a specific story you recall hearing or reading but is now missing from the website. What evidence do you have to support your claim? What leads you to believe that NPR is scrubbing stories?

          • I still have my responses to the posts which I archived off-line. Without the posts they’re meaningless. I can confirm that the material responded to is no longer accessible by using both Google and Disqus to find them. They are gone.

            That satisfies me.

            At that point all you’re left with is calling me either incompetent at searching or a liar.

            I am sure you can guess what the response to either would be.

          • I’m not calling you anything, I’m asking you to provide evidence to substantiate the damning assertion you have made on a public forum. If you have the comments archived, then that must mean you at least have the headlines or some other indication of what the story was about, along with the dates. Can you share those, so that other people can investigate your claim?

          • And I am telling you that, as with Hillary’s deleted files, you can’t resurrect what’s gone and erased.

          • That’s not true. As Mike said, any story that NPR deleted would still be on the Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/

            And even if that weren’t the case, screenshots of your archived comments would serve as evidence to support your claim. Come on, give us a headline and a date, and we’ll try to figure out if the article has indeed been deleted.

          • Nope. I would need the original url to search the Wayback Machine. I already stated that my archive is of my contribution to discussions, so all I have is content.

            This is a circular argument you’re making. If I say I have evidence of a discussion with content XYZ, and a search of NPR’s scrubbed archives shows zero articles containing XYZ, your next step is to claim I fabricated the assertion that an article contained XYZ.

            If you wish to be vexatious and incredulous, that is certainly your choice and your right, but I have no intention of fueling you further.

          • If you provide us with evidence of the story topic and the approximate date, and we are unable to find any story matching that description, then that would bolster your claim. You could provide us with links to the specific Disqus threads or screenshots. You’re unwilling to do that, then I’m going to suggest to Mike that he delete your comment, because you’ve made an incredibly incriminating assertion here and so far provided no information to back it up.

          • Also, the Wayback Machine spiders through the whole site every time it archives. You don’t need the specific url. You just need the date, then you plug npr.org into the the Wayback Machine, go to the nearest date, and then navigate the site per usual.

          • Have you tried finding one of these deleted posts on the Wayback Machine? https://archive.org/web/ If you could find a page there that is no longer on the site, that would serve as proof of what you’re saying. I’m interested in seeing evidence because this would be worth further reporting on if your claim is accurate.

  4. Anyone notice that NPR has removed (censored) the comments on Facebook? No negative reviews about their bias. And after the 5 star reviews dwindled, they removed the ratings altogether.
    LOL.

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