Q: What does the Journal Star and Vonster have in common?

A: They don’t allow comments on their websites.

Oh, sure, you can e-mail them, and they may or may not choose to publish your response. But their interactivity is limited to a more traditional “we’ll talk to you publicly, and you can talk to us privately” approach.

As I was checking out the news on the Bloomington Pantagraph and Springfield’s State Journal-Register, I noticed that, after each news article, there’s a blog-like comments section where readers can self-publish their responses to the news stories. The Journal Star doesn’t offer this benefit to its readers. I thought perhaps it was a corporate policy, but Springfield’s paper is owned by the same corporation as the Journal Star, Copley Press, Inc.

Well, the good news is that we have a robust blogging community here in Peoria that picks up the Journal Star’s slack. Bill Dennis does an excellent job of picking the most interesting news stories out of the paper each day and publishing them as a regular feature (“Today’s News Budget”) on his Peoria Pundit site.

You’d think the Journal Star would rather see all that reader reaction at their own site where readers would be seeing their advertisements and perhaps clicking around to other articles — maybe even stumbling across the subscription page and deciding to get a hard-copy delivered.

Perhaps they don’t understand the technology well enough to add this functionality to their site. Or maybe they don’t want the hassle of monitoring it to keep it safe for families to read. Or maybe they think blogging is just a fad that will run its course and not worth the jump onto the bandwagon.

Whatever the reason, the Journal Star’s website is the poorer for it. But their loss is our gain, so I’m not complaining.