Daily Record suspends comments on football articles

The Daily Record's digital editorial director Ewan Watt says the newspaper hopes to "find a solution" after comments on football articles were suspended last week due to ongoing commenting it says breached its terms and conditions.

In an announcement to readers on Friday (12 October) the Daily Record said while it does "value the opinions of our readers" there has been "an unacceptable level of behaviour" which led to the decision to close the commenting facility on its football articles.

The post adds that "it will still be possible to comment on non-football stories but we will be enforcing a zero tolerance policy on users who add inappropriate, off-topic comments about football to otherwise unrelated articles".

The Daily Record says it "will also be clamping down on users who attempt to register using false names".

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk today, digital editorial director Ewan Watt said there has been an ongoing problem in relation to some of the comments left by a minority, particularly on football stories, that he said "can contravene the terms and conditions".

He added that despite the newspaper's efforts to clamp down on the issue, "we came to the decision, both myself and the editor jointly, that we had to take more decisive action, so at that point we suspended comments on all football articles".

Since taking the decision Watt said the newspaper has "had quite a large number of encouraging emails from people" in response to the decision.

Looking ahead he said the comments will be suspended while the newspaper looks internally at methods which could help tackle the problem.

"I would hope we can find a solution to the problem, but at the moment regrettably this is action we've had to take. I don't see it being short-term, as in a couple of weeks, this might take a product development."

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