Tumbly McTumbleton

Newspaper to Charge People to Comment

marco:

(via nostrich, sasquatchmedia)

From tomorrow, the Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts paper, will charge would-be commenters a nominal one-off fee of 99 cents. But it has to be paid by credit card, which means providing a real name and address.

And the name on the credit card will be the name that will appear on comments. So it’s goodbye to anonymity.

This is an excellent idea, and I bet it will work: there will still be plenty of comments (not as many, but enough), and they’ll be more civil, more intelligent, and better written.