This article from CNN does a nice job explaining the various issues and approaches around comments, but there’s a piece missing:

Can the time and effort spent on comments be justified?

If a staffer (or staffers) has to spend an hour-plus each day weeding through hateful nonsense — or just nonsensy nonsense — is that an effective use of time and resources? Could that effort be put to use developing a robust Twitter account? Could that person be developing a great newsletter?

I used to be as pro-comment as they come, but the idiocy on most newspaper sites (and YouTube … my God … YouTube is the worst) have changed my mind. Unless a news site is going to commit, full-on, to a comment policy, I don’t see the point. You can’t half-ass this stuff anymore.

This piece focuses on the top-down vs. bottom-up approaches of design, but some of the insights apply to citizen journalism as well.

I’ve always believed that the best Web-based content efforts involve equal portions of top-down editorial decisions from trained journalists with bottom-up insight from the community. Alone, neither method is particularly useful, but together you see a symbiotic relationship form between content, community, feedback and editorial experimentation. This is why the Web is so profound; no other platform has this feedback loop built in.

For some people, myself included, teaching offers a huge rush. The trick is finding these folks and giving them proper incentive — notoriety, reputation-building, self-promotion, etc. — to participate.

A company tapping a user base also needs to apply a heavy dose of realism. The best forums are organic collections of loosely assembled people. That doesn’t change, so a business needs to resist making projections against self-motivated groups. It should build its user-generated/-driven efforts around the natural cycle of adoption-interest-departure.