During the recent INMA Media Subscriptions Summit study tour, The Toronto Star gave one a very good example of how comments can create community.

Christine Loureiro, senior editor for audience engagement and live journalism, had a simple idea: What if journalists stopped ignoring the comments and actually showed up in them? She called it “going below the line.” The name, she admitted, was borrowed from The Telegraph.

They started with 12 journalists, all different ages, different beats, different levels of skepticism. The assignment: Pick two moments over six weeks to drop into your comments section — either respond to an existing story or announce a live AMA in advance.

No new daily habits required. Just: Try it!

The first real proof of concept came with a story about automated speed enforcement cameras in Ontario. 

“We clocked that every time we published a story there was between one and 600 comments,” Loureiro explained. 

These weren’t bots. These were all people who registered and were having active, heated debates about whether these were good or bad. So they asked one of their reporters to drop below the line and spend an hour answering questions and correcting misinformation. 

The result: nearly 13x more comments and replies than the site average that day, 15x times more commenters, 8x more likes and dislikes.

But more than the numbers, the conversation became a source. Readers shared stories about tickets they’d received for driving barely over the threshold. 

The team fed thousands of comments into their AI tool, extracted the most relevant ones, and handed a list of potential interviewees back to reporters. They hadn’t gone in looking for stories. They found them anyway.

The pilot expanded: Three cohorts later, around 75 journalists have now been trained with a goal of reaching the entire newsroom this year. 

And then there’s the case I keep thinking about. An unsolved billionaire murder in Toronto that the Toronto Star turned into a podcast series called Suspicion: The Billionaire Murders, hosted by Kevin Donovan, the journalist who probably has the best insight on the case. 

They announced Donovan will be in the comments every Tuesday after the new episode has come out. 

“We paywalled it so there was an incentive to either sign up and subscribe,” Loureiro explained. 

Donovan sat there and answered every question, sometimes for two hours. Every week, more engagement than the week before. Readers gave tips. Some of them might have actually mattered. The team joked — half seriously — that readers might just solve the case.

That’s not a comment section. That’s a community.

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Banner photo: Adobe Stock By Davide Angelini.

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