A comment about our comments

I received this piece of feedback from a NewsOK user in the state of Washington.

Thanks to whoever is responsible for deciding to disable comments on stories such as crimes and deaths. We don’t need to read the hateful comments, speculation, personal agendas, etc that people put out on other newspapers’ sites.

Cindy
Port Ludlow, Washington

We moved from OKC five years ago, after 60 years in Oklahoma and Arkansas. We take USA Today and two local papers here but I still read the Oklahoman online every day.

Ultimately, Kelly Fry, our vice president of news and information, is responsible for that decision years ago.

Disabling the comments on articles involving crimes or fatalities is something we think is important for civil dialogue and general fairness. We’ve taken some criticism for it, but we still feel it’s important for our product.

We’ve been talking about our comments quite a bit internally — how we improve them … how we should treat them …. how we should display them. We’ve made some recent changes and are still evaluating the results.

I’ll write about the subject more in the future, but I love hearing feedback from our users. Keep it coming.