Sep062008
Saturday To Feature Online Comments
Filed under Uncategorized by nick pappas at 12:50 am
Each week, hundreds of readers turn to our Web site to post comments in response to stories, letters to the editor and other items. So we thought we would try something different today by sharing some of those comments from the more popular online postings with readers of the newspaper.
Among the stories to attract a lot of reader comments – not surprisingly – was a news blog item we posted Monday by the Associated Press under the headline: “Palin: 17-year-old daughter is pregnant.” By Friday afternoon, the initial blog item had generated about 120 comments.
As you can imagine, the story about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s family sparked a far-reaching debate that encompassed abstinence-only education, birth control, abortion, adoption, working women and, of course, left vs. right politics.
Here is the first comment that launched the weeklong discussion, which was posted by someone using the screen name MICHAELEDWARD:
Mr. (John) McCain is against any federal funding for birth control and sex education. He supports President Bush’s abstinence only education as a method of preventing AIDS. He is not willing to admit that use of barrier contraceptives prevented transmission of HIV.
Ms. Palin is a strong believer in Abstinence Only Sexual Education. Scientific studies show this avenue of education fails to meet its goals.
Such strong advocates for a demonstrably failed policy hardly seems appropriate at the level of President and Vice President.
Another reader posting as “lbj” raised the adoption issue:
Whatever happened to adoption as an option for young unwed mothers? Why should this teenager pay for her mistake with the rest of her life, when there are many loving couples who would give the child a good home?
And then there was this item from Wake Up People:
What ever happened to “Hey Mom, I’m having sex whether you like it or not. Can I please go on the pill?” It sounds a lot easier to say than “Hey Mom, I’m pregnant, sorry if it ruins your campaign for VP.”
Closer to home, another ongoing story that continues to generate its share of online comments is the July arrest of Lull Farm owner David Orde on marijuana-growing charges at his home in Hollis.
Last week, a Nashua District Court judge threw out the charges on the grounds that police didn’t present any evidence on the weight of the plants, though the case isn’t necessarily over.
Our breaking-news blog item on that ruling Tuesday generated about 50 comments over the course of the week, adding to the hundreds that have been posted to previous stories since the arrest.
Someone writing as “justacitizen” kicked off the discussion with this:
That is great news, this man did not deserve to be prosecuted for growing for his own use.
Congrats, and I hope the Grand Jury does not indict either!
Legalize it!
Not everyone was in a celebratory mood over the judge’s ruling. One of those contributors was R. King:
He will absolutely be indicted. Technically, the state could seize all assets including the farm as this was all the same property. The state has seized cars, boats, motorcycles and property. This is one piece of property that is obviously very rich and worth tons of cash . . .
I don’t care how many fresh vegetables this man grows, he’s also growing poison and he should go down just like any other person. He knows very well the laws surrounding cultivation of Mary Jane in the state of NH.
That posting drew a rather incredulous response from “Mike” over the suggestion the government might seize Orde’s assets.
So . . . lemme get this straight . . . because he grew 11 lousy pot plants, he deserves to lose all of his money and assets? Seems to me that is quite unfair to lose everything you have worked your whole life for, especially since he wasn’t hurting anyone.
So, there is this week’s sampling of online reader comments, which continue to be an immensely popular feature at www.nashuatelegraph.com ever since we introduced them about a year ago.
On any given day, we receive between 120 and 150 reader comments, which translates to about 1,000 each week. We believe that’s pretty good for a community newspaper of our size.
In fact, in order to share some of those comments with our print readers, we are thinking about using this Saturday space under the editorial cartoon to publish a sampling of those comments – without my annoying commentary – as an experiment of sorts.
We’ll try that over the next few weeks to see what kind of feedback we get from readers. If you like it, then we will make it a regular feature on the Saturday Opinion page; if you don’t, then we will reconsider.
So let me know what you think. In the meantime, I’ll float the idea by members of our Reader Advisory Network, too.
Nick Pappas is editorial page editor at The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6505 or npappas@nashuatelegraph.com.
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