Imagine living with the ability for anyone and everyone to anonymously tattoo their opinions and personal gripes about who you are and how you’re living your life. Would you be able to trust the world with that privilege?
Last February, that privilege is essentially what we at The Daily Utah Chronicle decided to give when we made the ability to post online comments on our website available for anyone willing to take the time to put them there.
The process is basically this: enter a name (real or not), an e-mail address (again, real or not) and agree to not post spam. Then you type until your heart is content, type in the three little letters that ensure you’re not a computer generating spam and voil, your post is permanently a part of the article or column.
With the extremely rare exception of a few comments, we could not be more pleased with how U students, professors and readers of our newspaper have handled that privilege.
The Chronicle‘s goal is to always offer the most well-informed and balanced information we can. With the help of numerous savvy, witty and well-read readers, we feel we’ve been able to come closer than ever to reaching that goal.
When Tony Pizza wrote a story about a woman getting punched at a party, online readers helped fill in the blanks that witnesses and authorities could not provide. When professors got fired, online readers helped round the story out with information that was otherwise unavailable. When Tiara C. Auxier, Nicholas Pappas, Anastasia Niedrich and Lauren Mueller wrote columns that rubbed people the wrong way, online readers added balance to those arguments.
Because The Chronicle is a college newspaper, it is also a learning newspaper. Comments, no matter how off-base or ridiculous, add to that learning process.
The public forum that the online comments offer has also inspired numerous excellent discussions that are typically handled in a way that significantly enhances our newspaper. It’s so refreshing to see college students handle themselves in a responsible and mature manner, when in reality, the ability to post online comments could be equivalent to the scribbles on the walls of a bathroom stall.
For the sake of consistency and accountability, it would be nice to require users to register with a user name to post online comments. We think this might drive away potential unnecessary commentaries, but to take away someone’s ability to create clever pseudonyms would be a shame.
So thank you, “Dumbazz,” “Eve,” “Guy,” “Tom Nedreberg,” “Wow!” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” “Hippies Smell,” “Ema,” “Mr. Anonymous,” “Not-a-pike,” “Chrigity,” “Uh,” “Confusious,” “doucheku,” “??????,” “Nick Bayne” and everyone else who contributes to our newspaper. Your readership and your comments are always welcome.