This post is written as a defence of Comment is Free. It's a defence in one point only and not in general. I post there very rarely, because much of what goes on in its comments boxes is a disgrace to public conversation, and that is the responsibility of the people managing the site as well as of those commenters who unrestrainedly chuck garbage of one kind and another.
Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling has a post about the 'failing project' of the Guardian. In this it looks like he means to convict the newspaper itself. What he brings in evidence, however, is a couple of posts from Comment is Free and one from the Guardian's sports blog - and Chris then talks of 'the typical Cif piece' and its typical shortcomings. There are two things wrong with this.
First, I don't think the Guardian is to be judged by the quality of the worst posts on Comment is Free. The latter is not a typical blog. I'm told that there are currently some 2,600 names on the contributor list; even with several hundred being one-offs that's a lot of contributors. It means that the site is a mega-blog: combining the features of a very large joint blog and a blog-host or provider. In the nature both of blogging as an activity - an activity in which even the very best practitioners have bad days and weak posts - and of that huge number of contributors, one is bound to be able to point to low-quality posts aplenty. Why should these be taken as reflecting badly on the newspaper that hosts the site? I defy anyone to construct something of its size, allowing all participants the usual freedoms of the blogger, without this leading to an uneven quality of output.
Second, there are good posts at Comment is Free. I merely assert that, and don't intend to back up the claim by hunting for links. I know from my own reading that it's true. Just on a probabilistic basis, you'd expect it to be, because of the very same fact (about the number of contributors) that generates the more dreadful stuff.
As for the Guardian itself, there are indeed features of the paper to lament, most especially the cuddle-a-terrorist pieces hug-a-tyrant articles exercises in anti-democratic apologia regularly appearing on its comments pages. But that's a story I don't need to retell right now.