Meet the stars of the New Haven Independent’s comments section.
In 2012, the New Haven Independent faced what its founder, Paul Bass, would remember as “a moment of truth.”
The online paper’s comments section had been deteriorating into a cesspool of unwieldy toxicity and petty personal jabs. One day, a particularly nasty attack on a public official slipped past Bass, then-editor-in-chief. The damage was irrevocable. With a stricken conscience, he removed the commenting option.
For a week, the Independent’s website was eerily silent. No longer were people engaging in zealous debate under articles or providing prompt feedback to writers. They instead took to Bass’ email inbox, which was flooded with letters from devastated commenters, media critics, and editors of other local papers.
In an Independent staff meeting the following week, Bass was outvoted 11 to 1 in reinstating the comments section. Though hesitant, Bass soon realized that it was simply a matter of strictly enforcing community guidelines and owning up to the inevitable mistakes.
“In that process, we learned how important a moderated comments section is,” Bass said. “Readers really deserve more of a say in the direction of coverage. We just have to be able to moderate it well.”
If you live in New Haven, you’ve likely heard of the Independent—the site receives approximately 170,000 unique visitors each month. (New Haven has a population of 140,000). Unlike its peer news sites, which are often owned by media conglomerates and have succumbed to homogeneously modern designs and paywalls, the Independent’s website resembles an early 2010s WordPress blog. Community notices and hyperlinks, all typed in humble Arial font, densely populate its side columns.
Though the Independent ultimately restored its commenting option, the New Haven Register and Hartford Courant had long struggled with hostile comments and eventually shut down their comments sections for good. The decisions were understandable. Comments sections are liabilities for small papers, Bass told me, as each comment that borders on libel can provoke a defamation lawsuit.
With rigorous moderation, the Independent’s comments section is thriving. At the bottom of every article, readers can express their disapproval and disillusionment with New Haven—but also join together in a fierce commitment to the city. “Some people call it their favorite public forum in New Haven,” Assistant Editor Dereen Shirnekhi told me.
Articles about contentious issues garner immense engagement. A piece covering protests over the war in Gaza received 134 comments, and recent articles about the Rosette Street tiny homes’ residents fighting to retain their permits consistently received about sixty each. Though lighter-hearted pieces receive less attention—on average about a dozen or so comments—the same commenters who duke it out under politically controversial articles might share their common appreciation for a successful youth reading event on the New Haven Green.
The commenters are lively, opinionated, and sometimes snarky. Some write long paragraphs with links to Connecticut law or news clippings. Others share personal experiences. According to Shirnekhi, frequent commenters become “characters.”
If that’s the case, then user @Kevin McCarthy has a starring role.
Weaving around a U-Haul truck, McCarthy waved at me from his scuffed-up violet bike. He just came back from a shift of packing food at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, and he’s wearing a checkered Timberland button-up tucked into khakis, which are then tucked into work boots. Ever since he retired, McCarthy cruises around New Haven, dividing his time among multiple nonprofit organizations.
McCarthy likes biking, cats, and the New Haven Independent comments section. As he talks, his fluffy eyebrows leap above his wire-frame glasses.
He’s known in the comments section for being judicious and impartial. During his tenure as a policy analyst in the Connecticut legislature, McCarthy became well-acquainted with issues from land use and housing to transportation and energy. It was essential, he told me, that his write-ups were bipartisan. With his experience, he brings to the comments section a pragmatic understanding of city issues as well as an extensive knowledge of legalese—under an article about tenant union organizer evictions, McCarthy still cites federal and local regulations like a researcher: “(see 42 CFR § 92.253)”.
His dedication to New Haven and his reliable, informative presence in the comments section landed him his own profile in the Independent. Under the article, his fellow commenters praised him as a “local treasure” and “hometown hero.”
Ben Trachten, a land use attorney, met McCarthy at a city planning commission meeting. Since then, they’ve regularly met for coffee to debate the technicalities of New Haven’s housing issues.
“We always come up with good dialogue and a good set of ideas to move New Haven in the direction that we want to see it go: more residential density, more residential choice,” Trachten told me.
Besides being a forum for open dialogue, the comments section has also become an authority check on the Independent’s writers. Commenters don’t hesitate to provide technical corrections or criticize articles they find biased. The writers of the Independent don’t editorialize; instead, they focus on running around New Haven to uncover information, with which readers can then form their own conclusions. The comments section thus becomes a space where commenters run their own quasi-opinion columns.
“When you start thinking your opinion matters more than the news or other people’s opinions, it makes you less useful,” Bass said, describing the accountability they receive from commenters as “liberating.”
The comments section has also inspired change at the grassroots level. Bass fondly told me about a late commenter Rebecca Turio, or @cedar hill resident, whose passionate advocacy in her comments was informed by her having lived in a lower-income neighborhood. Through engaging with Independent articles and other readers, she grew more invested in activism and would attend city meetings proudly proclaiming her identity as a commenter—“I’m cedar hill resident!”
In a city dominated by progressives, software engineer Joshua Van Hoesen stands out in the comments. In 2023, when he was campaigning for alder in Ward 26 as a Republican, he used the Independent’s comments section to expound on his values—“old school, fiscally responsible, [and] moderate,” he told me. (He has since dropped his affiliation with the Republican party). Van Hoesen tells me that his views were frequently challenged and even changed as he interacted with other commenters.
But Dennis Serfilippi, who ran for Ward 25 alder as a Democrat in 2019 and 2023, isn’t convinced that the comments section inspires significant policy changes. According to Serfilippi, commenters comprise just a small portion of the populace and occupy a powerless space between the average resident and the New Haven government: more informed than the former, but not taken seriously by the latter. “Until more people get involved and understand what’s happening, then things won’t change,” Serfilippi told me.
When I asked these commenters whom they interacted with most, each immediately rattled off several names. Everyone seemed to have contentious dialogues with @CityYankee2, a staunch Republican and infamous online contrarian. McCarthy told me he occasionally disagrees with @THREEFIFTHS, a Black man from New York City, but the two are Facebook friends. He also knows @Patricia Kane, who ran for alder as a member of the Green Party in 2021.
Patricia Kane confessed that her early interchanges with McCarthy in the comments section were antagonistic. One day, wanting to smooth things over, he suggested they meet up over coffee. Though they’ll still agree to disagree, they’ve been friends since.
“I ended up mending his Irish knit sweater,” Kane said.
Like many other commenters, Kane is deeply committed to supporting independent journalism and demanding transparency from our local and national governments. She believes that the New England tradition of spirited town hall meetings endures in the Independent’s comments section.
Kane moved to Mexico two months ago. She now lives two hours behind New Haven and thousands of miles away, but she still fondly keeps up with the local happenings and all her fellow commenters—friends and adversaries alike. Though she doesn’t comment anymore, Kane hasn’t been able to detach from the community here.
Every morning in Mexico, without fail, Kane logs on and checks the Independent’s comments section.
*This article has been updated to include the most recent recent estimate of unique monthly visitors to the New Haven Independent‘s website.
Tina Li is a sophomore in Pierson College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.
