At the Association of Norwegian Editors conference last week, one magazine editor said that she was scared of letting users comment stories on the web. The new NRK chief was more positive, he said he “had heard” that there was a civilization “out there” on the web. And now Ben Hammersley. At his talk in Bergen yesterday, he strongly advised editors against letting users contribute comments. At the Guardian Comment is free website which he set up last year, 2.500 commenters have been banned for hate speech, he told us, and then he mentioned Godwin’s Law. The point seemed to be: people are deserting old media and embracing Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and what have you, but the media shouldn’t try to join this game. They should let the user participation formats evolve and concentrate on innovation in news storytelling. So are we really to give up the idea of civil debate on the web? If Hammersley is right about the universality of Godwin’s Law, then how do you account for all the debating arenas that do work? Could it be that the experiences at Comment is free can’t be generalized? Are authors at Comment is free nurturing the user debates there or just abandoning them? Because that is one recipe for debate destruction.

After this it was heartening to hear BBC World’s head of news talk about his own views and experiences with user debate. Richard Porter learned the new rules the hard way recently, when he investigated and blogged about his investigation of a “controversy” about the BBC’s reporting on 9/11. Conspiracies and 9/11, probably the most difficult topic of all to discuss with readers, and Porter was attacked in the comments and in countless emails. Porter said he wrote back to some of them and asked how they could say what they did about him without knowing him, and even invited one guy to come and get a tour of the BBC’s news facilities. But all this commotion hasn’t scared Porter away: Being open, and blogging is one of the ways to increase transparency, is going to a key element in building trust in the future, he said: “Even if that means I get a lot of abuse.” It will be one of the features of news media in the coming years that people can question what you do, Porter concluded. Then he came to the role of blogs: especially in the US bloggers have hounded journalists for something they’ve said, and that can be unpleasant. But here’s the main lesson from Porter: “They have also forced some of us to be absolutely sure of our facts before we go on air.” And if you do a mistake, which you will do sometimes anyway, you should write about it on your own blog. Admitting mistakes also builds trust.

I don’t really believe that Ben Hammersley thinks the media should insulate themselves from their audience, it doesn’t fit with his overall message. And his ideas on news storytelling are very inspiring and spot on. More about them later.