Comment Is Free: 5
“secondment,” or temporary assignment, with the website. More extensive staff integration is
anticipated when all three sister organizations move to new quarters in north London later this year.
The website has won multiple commendations, including three consecutive “Webby” awards
for best newspaper website in 2005, 2006, and 2007 (Kiss, 2007). It includes hundreds of blogs
from staffers and commissioned writers; its Comment Is Free section, launched in 2006, has quickly
become Britain’s leading comment blog, attracting 350,000 comments or more a month (Guardian
Media Group, 2007c; personal communication). It brings together print columnists with outside
commentators, with the stated aim of providing “an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument
and agreement” (guardian.co.uk, n.d.). With exceptions for topics deemed especially sensitive, such
as “Blogging the Qur’an,” comments are not pre-moderated; however, any comment which a reader
flags as “offensive” or “unsuitable” is reviewed by an editor and may be pulled.
At the time of this study, the Guardian allowed free-form user content – that is, material not
directly tied to content it has provided – only in an obituary segment called “Other Lives”; one part
of its online travel section, to which users contribute short items about places they have visited; and
its user-instigated talk boards. The boards, which predate Comment Is Free, remain active but are
not prominently featured in the current website design. Journalists are relatively uninvolved in the
boards, and few referred to them at all in the interviews on which this study is based.
LITERATURE: CONTEXT and PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK
This section begins with a brief overview of scholarship on user-generated content, followed
by a quick summary of work on journalism ethics in a digital environment. The bulk of the section
explores key aspects of existentialist philosophy relevant to the current work.
User-Generated Content: The reaction of journalists to UGC – the contributions of non-
journalists to traditional media products – has begun attracting scholarly attention. Building on
Convention