A group from Medill’s journalism school has created an open-source tool called News Mixer that integrates Facebook IDs into its interface.

Medill’s tool takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto. You know you’ve seen it — those awful, racist, and oftentimes off-topic comments made under some news articles. Newspaper Webmasters have been notoriously awful at moderating their communities. Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, once used Topix.net for its commenting. Not only were the BJ people outsourcing their comments, they were sending them to Topix, the ghetto of commenting ghettos. Much to the publication’s credit, the Beacon moved its comments back on site a few months ago.

News Mixer features three ways to converse:

1. Q&A – Leave questions for reporters or other readers
2. Quips – Short, less than 140-word thoughts
3. Letters to the editor – Longer than quips and the software allows editors to highlight the best

The icing on the cake, though, is the Facebook ID integration. This forces users to use their real identities — although the users could fake a profile on Facebook, just like anywhere else, but I don’t see this as likely as on-the-spot Web site registration. The social-networking integration isn’t completely new. A couple months ago, CNBC inked a deal with LinkedIn to use that social network’s profiles on its site.

Facebook Connect Live lists what sites are using its new platform. With Facebook Connect, users can utilize their Facebook ID’s to log into other sites to leave comments and extend their identity beyond the walls of Facebook. This is similar to OpenSocial and OpenID, which I’ve written about before.

Perhaps Newsmixer will help end the debate over the value of story commenting. Yes, there is value! Blogs and other non-newspaper sites have proven this for the past few years. The difference, though, as Techdirt notes (emphasis mine):

The argument [against commenting on newspaper sites] is, basically, that a lot of the comments are really dumb, and don’t add very much. That may be true, but in many cases, that’s because the newspaper doesn’t give anyone incentive to add smart comments. There’s no indication that anyone at most newspapers read the comments. The authors of the articles rarely, if ever, respond to people in the comments. There’s little to no engagement or discussion. So, instead, the comments just become a way for readers to vent. Just tossing up comments and thinking you’ve created a community is a mistake — but that doesn’t mean newspapers shouldn’t enable comments. It just means they should do so in a more intelligent manner.

I onced suggested — and received a fantastic guffaw from an older journalist — that we should treat stories online more and more like blogs. Does this mean dropping objectivity and providing more analysis than just-the-facts-m’am? I don’t know, but I do think it means writing stories and directly engaging the people who comment below them. Aside this News Mixer system, reporters should be regularly responding to and commenting below their stories. Arguably, these same journalists, with some help, should be managing the online communities of their beats.

(News Mixer stuff via Patrick Beeson)