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Yahoo News Brings News Commenting Back

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After a three year hiatus, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) News is once again opening up to news commenters. The site, which has been the top source of online news in the country for several years now, quietly added a standard commenting feature late last evening to all of its articles, which allows visitors to post their opinions, respond to specific views left by others, and vote comments up or down. Most of its big (and smaller) rivals already feature similar systems.

Yahoo News had previously allowed its users to comment on news articles via message boards. But the company shut those down in late 2006 in part because of the poor quality of discussion. “The feeling as I understand it was that it was degrading the quality of the site rather than enhancing it,” says Mark Walker, who heads up Yahoo News in North America. This time around, Yahoo has added filtering technologies to its comment streams, in order to ensure that higher quality comments are highlighted. (Walker says there are seven levels of “technical comment moderation.”)

Walker tells us that Yahoo News users demanded that the site add some sort of commenting system. “We sort of looked at our customer satisfaction research and some of the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their first amendment rights,” he says. “There was a very strong desire from the audience—which is an engaged audience which has something to say—to interact with the news site at a much more profound level.”

Walker wouldn’t say what Yahoo News’ expectations for the volume of comments are, but, less than one day in, users already appear to be embracing them. The top story on Yahoo News right now—“Senate GOP leader says budget impasse to end soon”—has 697 comments. Hard to judge the quality, however. The debate is raging with both some serious historical perspective, as well as a fair amount of name-calling.

Joseph Tartakoff
@josephtartakoff Mar 2, 2010 4:50 PM ET

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Posted In: Media & Publishing, Online News, Technologies / Formats, Companies, Yahoo

  • Rana

    The quality of discussion has certainly improved: try going to the news pages for anything involving Obama: actually, even those pages that don’t involve him as well. I saw the most educated of people informing the world at large of his communist Muslim policies on an article about rhinos.

  • Brandon

    Although surprising at first, I was glad they disabled the feature, especially in relation to the more controversial stories. Too many people go to open forums just to keep up drama. There are many sites out there with most or all of the same articles featured on Yahoo - many even partisan making the likelihood of finding like minds much greater, so the fact that no one could comment on yahoo didn’t prevent anything except a major news source from becoming a circus.

  • Nancy

    It would be nice to know if Yahoo’s “filtering technologies to its comment streams, in order to ensure that higher quality comments are highlighted. (Walker says there are seven levels of “technical comment moderation.”)  are what is causing my comments TO NOT BE POSTED.

    Or they may be having major “server errors”

  • viewsagent

    News is in great transformation… Twitter seems to be main instrument at the present but basically people are the new news filters….

    This is a new evolutionary avenue.. Yahoo and perhaps all news organisations need to be considering the dynamics of commentary on news stories and interactivity around that

  • informed guest

    joseph, here’s data suggesting since 2004 by the way:
    http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2006/chartland.asp?id=485&ct=col&dir=&sort=&col2_box=1

    bottomline—been cruising for a very long while.  not a new deal by any stretch.

  • Joseph Tartakoff

    Thanks informed guest. I tweaked the sentence. Yahoo News told me that they had been number one “since at least Nov ’08”—the furthest back they could pull data. By the way, this is all comScore data.

  • informed guest

    Correction for you.  Yahoo! News has been the top source for online news for WELL more than a year and a half.  Its more like 5 plus years.  Here’s comscore from at least as far back as 2005:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonytam/361916014/sizes/o/

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