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Online search engine-slash-titan Google announced the other night that they are going to add a new feature to their (in my mind, peerless) news page: Comments from those people mentioned within the stories. According to their statement:

We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.

At first blush, this sounds great. Let’s get the information straight from the horse’s mouth. If there is more to the story, let’s hear it out.

But this new tactic brings a substantial “caveat emptor” to the process. After all, part of the journalist’s job is to cull out the wheat from the chaff, to find out where the “news” is in a story. Sure, you and I may disagree on what the pull quote was from the other night’s Democratic ‘Forum.’ (Really? Hillary Clinton said “I’m your girl?” That’s all we get from the 90-minute discussion?) But without the journalist attempting to boil down a speech or an issue to a couple hundred words, we’re back where we started.

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