I have some suggestions. First, throw off the yoke of what media consultant Vin Crosbie calls the "techno-utopian fallacy." This says that by implementing new software tools, technology and the Internet will create a brave new world of civic involvement and a renaissance for media companies. Media companies today, with reader and viewership numbers dropping along with their stock prices, are further cowed by arrogant claims of the ascendant Internet culture and its Ayn Rand-like absolutism against any controls.

Self-interest may contribute. Controls on comments may cut traffic.

But if news is moving from being a lecture to a conversation with readers, then readers must be as transparent and play by the same ethical rules as the media. Certainly, unfettered, ugly, racist, personal and similar sorts of rants do not contribute to civic discourse, but rather undermine it. The law may catch up with the Internet anyway, and should.

What all this means is that The Miami Herald should do what The New York Times has recently done: Bite the budget bullet to hire editors to review comments before they are posted, especially for stories most likely to attract offenders. Steve Myers, of Poynteronline -- a website for The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists -- says that articles related to race, immigration and child abuse are particular magnets.

Registration, which the techno community opposes, is a must. On the Taylor story, both ESPN.com and WashingtonPost.com reported far fewer offensive comments than The Miami Herald. One difference is that those sites require registration, including confirmation of the reader's e-mail address.

The number of visitors to MiamiHerald.com in November was up 66 percent from the year before, according to Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, and registration might slow or even temporarily reverse such strong growth. I suspect from their language that the ranters in the site are not the young, upwardly mobile or educated readers that The Miami Herald and its advertisers want.

Indeed, what many monitored blogs have shown, especially sports ones, is that a sense of community grows among readers participating in civil exchange, whatever the differences, and that the participants themselves come down harshly on offenders.

As Hirsch told me, there is no perfect solution in such an open environment as the Web. "Also, we want a free-flowing debate, " he said.

I agree. But as The Miami Herald feels its way forward, it can't shirk its responsibility to impose rules that benefit the overwhelming number of us as readers and as citizens.

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