Fundamentally, the problem is the community. If you don't attract people who make good comments and you don't have a high enough ratio, you won't have a good system no matter what you do. And I think newspapers have a couple problems there:
* Good communities on the Internet generally are focused on a specific topic. That encourages people who like the field to show up and gives most participants something in common. They have similar base knowledge, similar interests, and the community has a goal. Sub-reddits are usually fairly focused, HN is actually a little broad, but still has a relatively narrow field of interest. A newspaper likely won't have that.
* Good communities are the result of "trying again". When a community goes bad, the better contributers leave and join new ones. The old ones generally die, either literally or they just go down the tubes in quality of content. The good communities you see are to some extent the result of many failed communities. But newspapers are fixed, they can't just die off and try again.
* Good communities have moderators who drop the ax on allowed content. This isn't a long-term solution, but I think it's necessary to have this until the community is primed and trained to vote wisely themselves. From my experience, starting a community with a core baseline of values is like herding cats. Someone in charge has to be firm and "unfair" for a while to get things started in the right direction. Would newspapers actually heavily censor their comments?
None are strict requirements, but I think they are very helpful in creating a good community.
For example, some sub-reddits have nearly died in terms of quality only to resurrect themselves back into something semi-worthwhile. (Only examples I can pull directly from memory are /r/pics and /r/technology, neither of which is a great subreddit now, but goodness gracious you should've seen them two or three years ago.) But in those cases, they had the advantage of the things you listed, like reddit's hell-banning, karma, and ruthless moderators who made unpopular authoritarian decisions until the voters were trained to do a good job themselves.
* Good communities on the Internet generally are focused on a specific topic. That encourages people who like the field to show up and gives most participants something in common. They have similar base knowledge, similar interests, and the community has a goal. Sub-reddits are usually fairly focused, HN is actually a little broad, but still has a relatively narrow field of interest. A newspaper likely won't have that.
* Good communities are the result of "trying again". When a community goes bad, the better contributers leave and join new ones. The old ones generally die, either literally or they just go down the tubes in quality of content. The good communities you see are to some extent the result of many failed communities. But newspapers are fixed, they can't just die off and try again.
* Good communities have moderators who drop the ax on allowed content. This isn't a long-term solution, but I think it's necessary to have this until the community is primed and trained to vote wisely themselves. From my experience, starting a community with a core baseline of values is like herding cats. Someone in charge has to be firm and "unfair" for a while to get things started in the right direction. Would newspapers actually heavily censor their comments?
None are strict requirements, but I think they are very helpful in creating a good community.
For example, some sub-reddits have nearly died in terms of quality only to resurrect themselves back into something semi-worthwhile. (Only examples I can pull directly from memory are /r/pics and /r/technology, neither of which is a great subreddit now, but goodness gracious you should've seen them two or three years ago.) But in those cases, they had the advantage of the things you listed, like reddit's hell-banning, karma, and ruthless moderators who made unpopular authoritarian decisions until the voters were trained to do a good job themselves.