(via nostrich, sasquatchmedia)
From tomorrow, the Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts paper, will charge would-be commenters a nominal one-off fee of 99 cents. But it has to be paid by credit card, which means providing a real name and address.
And the name on the credit card will be the name that will appear on comments. So it’s goodbye to anonymity.
This is an excellent idea, and I bet it will work: there will still be plenty of comments (not as many, but enough), and they’ll be more civil, more intelligent, and better written.
Norwegian newspaper dagbladet tried that. Can’t say the comments are better in any sense. Before they started to charge for commenting, smart people could chime in on occasion without much effort, now the crazies have the comments for themselves as smart people who seldom comments won’t bother to pay for the “privilege” to comment.
