The Bivings Report is, er, reporting that the Sacramento Bee is requiring commenters on its website to start using their real names:
At first the paper allowed commenters to hide behind pseudonyms. However, to a few people’s surprise, this freed some commenters to earn the rather mild title from staffers of “provocateur” as they slung vitriol of all types at those who disagreed with them. Some site participants stopped participating out of annoyance and disgust.
To counter the provocateurs, the Bee will soon require all commenters to user their real name on the site. While, as ombudsman Aramando Acuna notes, this will likely lead to fewer comments, many readers support stripping anonymity away from commenters. Further, the paper hopes that this policy will lessen the need for it to monitor and approve or reject every comment before it is publicly posted.
Fewer commenters is not necessarily a bad thing. Quality over quantity.
It’ll be interesting to see how exactly the Bee goes about confirming these identites but I can’t fault them for setting up the restrictions. Blogs and commenting on blogs is little different than writing a letter to the editor, something very few (if any) papers take and publish anonymously.