Completely depends on the content, audience and commenting system. Having conversation around your content is fantastic. If your audience prefers to discuss with their own social circles on Facebook, Twitter, etc then having a commenting system on your site may not do anything for you.

On the other hand, if visitors are encouraged to share their own travel stories and contribute to the content, then having comments could be of great value. In this case, it's part of your strategy, which means you'll also need to dedicate time and energy to make it work.

Having comments for comments sake is not worth it. I'd add some options to share content via other social sites/services instead.

No, they are neither necessary nor worthwhile. I like Bloomberg's approach of including contact information for the editors/authors of a news piece, which provides readers with a channel for feedback without providing a platform for trolls or people who are too stupid to string a coherent sentence together.

Elitist? yes, somewhat. But the 'comments with everything' approach which has become associated with Web 2.0 over the last few years has IMO demonstrated that there is a vast pool of stupid people out there, and a small but persistent group of troublemakers who enjoy baiting other readers. I don't know why so many companies - especially in the beleaguered media industry - have become so tolerant of the cesspool that most comment sections become. There is nothing more destructive to your brand than linking it to the ranting of ignorant know-nothings. Even on 'premium' news outlets such as economist.com, the quality of debate in the commentary section is execrable.

Any time I feel slightly guilty about this elitist attitude of mine, I refer to this funny-because-it's-true story from the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/study_38_percent...

Sadly, I know of no serious research that has been undertaken on the signal-noise ratio of internet comments to content in different social media. So I can't send you back to your publisher armed with any statistical data to show that comment functionality will either help or hurt readership - I only have my own opinion to offer. Although I think 2 way interaction between publishers and consumers is valuable and can help to build persistent audiences, in my view the best way to do this is with a heavily moderated forum, in which some kind of threaded discussion structure makes it easier for readers and editors to prune unworthy contributions. Anyone running a large website with dynamic content needs to employ someone just to keep an eye on comments or reader feedback anyway, if only to be alert to the possibility of people deliberately taking a public crap in the comments; much better, then, filter and moderate visitor contributions proactively, rather than after they've polluted the brand and associated content.

One question I would ask: How closely can you monitor and moderate it so that trollish comments and other undesirable crap doesn't bring down the quality? If the answer is "Not very", then some other means to let users voice their opinions/interact with the site is probably better. Moderating is very time consuming and if it is done badly it alienates users, probably more than not having a comment system would.

There is something self-referential about this post, but I can't quite figure out what.

I personally took comments off of my blog. It seems like news aggregators are a better place for commenting.