My students had an eye-opening moment the other day when they looked at the comments on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s site. Comments there are consistently vitriolic, generally offensive, and occasionally funny.

One thought, if they made me king of all media: each article would have two sets of comments, one from named, registered folks where a reasonable effort was made to verify their identity, followed by a second section of comments for anonymous users. There is a place for reasoned debate but I’ve not found any place where allowing anonymous comments has produced anything but bile. And this way people could chose which section they want to read.