Recent adjustments to their online commenting systems suggest that news organisations have been reevaluating the value of user-generated discussions as addenda to published articles.

The New York Times reported that in the next few months, The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy in order to possibly give greater prominence to real names over anonymous posters. Many papers, including The New York Times and The Post, often require users to register before commenting.

Some publications, such as The Minneapolis Star Tribune, completely disable comments on sensitive stories; others like the Greensboro News & Record decide on a case-by-case basis which comments to post online. The Atlantic's Daily Dish simply bans all comments.

According to Poynter.org, The Huffington Post, The Economist and The Sacramento Press have all recently altered their approaches to moderating comments, in order to foster better dialogues on their Web sites.

The Huffington Post's Web site, which receives an estimated 2.3 million comments a month, introduced "HuffPo Badges" last week to boost reader interaction. Eric Hippeau, CEO of the Huffington Post, said in a phone interview with Poyntor that "by giving people more visibility in terms of their role within the community, we make them more engaged. It's a little bit more fun for them and they get recognized by their peers." The badges also reward users who report profanity, personal attacks and racial slurs that have slipped past its 30 full-time and part time comment moderators.

The Web site's move to more actively engage in social networking is part of a strategy for future growth - to net an increasing amount of readers. Social sharing of links on networking platforms "is the fastest growing part of our traffic," Hippeau told TechCrunch. "Search is still bigger, but referrals from social networks are growing much faster."

Meanwhile, the Economist has begun to write columns highlighting comments that appear to enrich discussions and generate thought-provoking content. In an innovative application of tag clouds, it also launched a "Conversation Cloud" a few weeks ago that links together the 25,000 comments the site gets a month.

Stressing the idea of healthy discussions, The Sacramento Press' comments section is titled "Conversation." Staff members regularly join conversations and communicate directly with commenters. In fact, a user who posted long, passionate comments was recently hired to write articles for the site.