Never read the comments: planning system reform discourse from the bottom of the web

In planning literature little attention has been paid to the relationships between news articles and readers’ comments. Based on a newspaper article that announced a planning system reform agenda in Sydney, Australia, this paper is curious about comments made by self-selecting commenters. To this end, the paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the actors, actions and the framing in a newspaper article, as well as the extent the readers’ comments engage with the news article and other commenters. The paper shows that the readers employed a diverse range of discursive strategies to make sense of the news article.