An interesting look at blogging journalists and their relationship with commenters by Mediating Conflict, following BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew’s comments on Twitter that he stopped his BBC blog because of the comments left on it.
There seems to be something of a backlash against the value of comments on blogs at the BBC. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that existing reservations about comments on blogs are beginning to surface.
Only last month, the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, described them as “the biggest problem” with his Newslog blog.
Now cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew has revealed he stopped blogging at the BBC because his posts were “always full of appalling comments“. Agnew now publishes a column on the BBC website instead and says he simply wouldn’t write a blog open to comments any more – “even with moderation in place“.