With all the vitriol that is present in the online arena today, it is refreshing to find a cyber conversation where the participants don’t resort to vicious personal attacks or indecipherable shorthand. Perhaps it is an elitist sentiment, but reading the comments on Google News is refreshing in a way that reading comments on The New York Times website or the Huffington Post absolutely is not. We know, it’s ironic that Google claims that the internet is all about openness yet only allows comments from "authority" sources or those who have been mentioned in a particular news article. The difference is that the comments do what they are intended to do in providing alternate or additional points of view that are relevant. Besides, if one really wanted the entire conversation uncensored, they could read the comments from the original article.

For PR practitioners, commenting on an article about your company, client or industry that matriculates on Google News (and they claim to aggregate more than 4500 news sources) is a valuable way to clarify a position or highlight an issue that the original news coverage might not have covered. It lends credibility to an online response in a way that commenting on a blog cannot always do. These comments regarding the recent USDA beef recall are an excellent example of the ways in which Google News commenting feature can be utilized.