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Paper posts unedited comments about stories

The Sacramento Bee’s Web site, www.sacbee.com, has begun allowing readers to post comments at the end of stories without any editing or filtering, although profane or libelous comments are removed later. “The aim is reader interactivity, in all its on-the-fly, real-time, gotta-do-it-now glory. And it’s making the paper’s newsprint veterans in turns nervous, perplexed and highly curious,” writes the Bee’s Public Editor, Armando Acuna. “Few papers allow similar comments, and, so far, The Bee may be the largest to do so.” Acuna says the ability to comment has been highly popular with readers, taking people at The Bee by surprise. Through the first two weeks, there were a combined 1,000 comments posted on 366 different stories. There were 20,000 page views, meaning people who read the comments that many times. Only a handful of comments have been killed. “What makes this more remarkable is that neither the paper nor sacbee.com promoted or advertised the change.”

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