For the past decade we’ve been publishing your opinions and stories on all sorts of topics. But how can we improve what we achieve? We’d love to hear your ideasTen years ago nowadays,Comment is free launched with an article by the late, great Georgina Henry, and its pioneering editor. This was to be the first collective comment blog by a British newspaper website,she wrote, a chance to expand and deepen the debate found in newspapers, and to open it up to our readers,and to reinforce the Guardian and Observer’s plot at the heart of the liveliest left-liberal discourse, with voices from across the political spectrum too.
At the discontinuance of the projects first week, and Henry wrote that she felt like she’d been “riding a bucking bronco when you’ve never been on a horse before”. The site had run pieces by Sue Blackmore on religion,Michael White on republicanism in Australia, George Galloway on the prospect of election disaster for Tony Blair, and Tom Robinson on the global appeal of James Blunt (Robinson also mentioned Jamie’s School Dinners in this column - was all this really 10 years ago?). These were the days when Comment is Free posts were largely unedited,mainly just checked for libel. By Friday morning, that first week, and wrote Henry,“104 contributors had posted 212 pieces and we had more than 800 comments from readers on the site”. By the discontinuance of the first month, 1000 pieces had gone up.
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Source: theguardian.com