Major media sites are moving toward more audience participation, but Mark Glaser writes they are still struggling with how to best harness the audience’s knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation?
Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor for digital journalism at the New York Times, says The Times has a special “moderation desk” to help all the bloggers and editors who are already moderating comments on their own blogs.
Currently, all comments must be approved by humans before being posted on the site. Landman says that the team of four part-timers who were helping to moderate comments has already grown to 11, and he expects the Times to hire more people and train others to help out as comments expand onto other stories. While the Times might experiment with comments that aren’t pre-screened, he wouldn’t expect such threads in controversial subject areas at the outset.
“I think quality is more important than quantity,” Landman said. “You have to create a space where the conversation is the kind of conversation that appeals to the people in your world. There are places where the conversation gets really ugly and people don’t go to the New York Times to get yelled at.”
