At IOL, we often have comments on stories that criticise us for carrying the story at all.
Most typical are comments on celebrity gossip snippets, asking if they are really news and wondering “who cares?”.
Our flippant response, it we could make one, would be “Well you, obviously, since you clicked on the headline.”
We also get a lot of complaints about low standards of editing and journalism - which are justified in some cases, and not in others. In response to these complaints, we’d often like to point out that if you are reading a free news source and if your expectation is that you should not have to pay for it, your argument is a little thin. Providing a free news site based entirely on advertising revenue is no easy task, and the staff costs involved in high-quality journalism are astronomical.
And journalists and columnists get subjected to a lot of vitriolic personal attacks which have nothing to do with the issues at hand - see for instance some of the bile directed at my column about fundraising ribbons last week.
So the people at IOL - and remember that we are in fact people, and not anonymous robots - make a lot of mistakes and take a lot of flak for that - and that’s the way it is supposed to be in a democracy.
And we do love getting up in the morning and delivering you the hardest, funniest and silliest news that we can, as fast as we can. And we like the comments that we get, however awful they are, because they help us in our mission to give our readers what they want.
Today - Black Tuesday - we are all outraged and sad, along with our journalism colleagues and civil society, that the government is continuing with its attacks on press freedom. We’d appreciate it you could - in the fine traditions of our reader debate - use our comment form below to tell us what you feel...