If a movie you wanted to see was at two theaters, and at one there were biker gangs out front twirling their chains, and at the other a group of meek college professors, which one would most normal people choose to go to?

The nut cases, the drunks, the just plain nasty people tend to take over and dominate online news comment venues … often, I suspect, because they have nothing else to do … and the type of people you’d like to be in your “community” are repelled and driven away.

I also think papers, in their desperate and pitiful attempt to gain readership by generating controversy, actually believe they have a vested interest in maintaining an anything-goes atmosphere.

In my view, online comments should be heavily screened and regulated by the paper.

Here’s a group that has been formed by attorney Andrea Weckerle, with Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on the board, to fight online hostility … http://civilination.org …

I’ve just come across your posts. I really like all you’ve written about the future of journalism being about aggregation and community creation.

Your post here too is right on target. But I’m curious: why do you frame community building in terms of just commenting? I’ve always been struck by how blogging / publishing allows the “community” to publish at the bottom of the page, but not post at the top. “Yes community, you can contribute in short-form in response, but no, you can’t actually initiate the communication with your own longer-form posts. We still frame the conversation, top-down.”

How crazy! Because if you’re covering a topic, your community has the knowledge that you’re looking to publish! Your job is just to build, manage and curate that community. You know this: I’ve looked at your Theme Park and Violin sites and there you’ve let the community not just comment but post. I look at sites like Seeking Alpha in finance or Bleacher Report in sports and they are really succeeding by crowdsourcing their content (i.e. posts, not just comments).

And as you’ve futher written about, the path to success for journalism revolves around the equation of value less costs of production . And crowdsourcing certainly reduces costs.

So why just commenting and not posting? I think a lot of it has to do with technology platforms. You’ve built one for your sites that bring in the community. SeekingAlpha, BleacherReport, etc. have built theirs. But the major CMS platforms–Wordpress, Drupal, etc.–aren’t built to allow a crowd–i.e. dozens, hundreds–of users to contribute. So it’s tough for sites to put all of these pieces together themselves. I’ve launched a service, Grogger, which is a platform for grogs or “group blogs.” We want to empower what we see as the future of publishing: crowdsourcing, where communities are contributing not just at the bottom of the page, but at the top.

There’s a lot to what we do ( and I’ve blogged about it). I’d really appreciate your feedback, even your participation in the venture as an advisor. Please let me know.

In case this isn

2. If news sites still don’t get it at this point it is clear that they are not interested in existing as going enterprises.