NPR Nixes Website Comments: Commenters Too Old, Too Male

83% are male.

National Public Radio is doing away with comments on its articles, claiming that few people actually comment and those that do are just old and white.

“In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters,” ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen said on NPR’s  website. “That’s 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016.”

Of those 19,400 commenters, 2,600 people were responsible for over half of the comments, suggesting most commenters were infrequent, casual participators.

But it wasn't merely a decision made on the numbers. Jensen said the commenters were most likely to be older men.

“They overwhelmingly comment via the desktop (younger users tend to find NPR.org via mobile), and a Google estimate suggested that the commenters were 83 percent male, while overall NPR.org users were just 52 percent male,” Jensen said, citing NPR Digital News Managing Editor Scott Montgomery.

Instead, NPR will focus on engaging readers through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach an audience they assume will not be so white and male, because white and male are both bad, obviously.

Other media websites, like CNN and Reuters, have shut down their comments section because anonymous internet users can be too abrasive or offensive.

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