Building the Community People Want

Bassey Etim

Community Desk Editor, New York Times

@basseye

#cmxsummit

How The Times Moderates

The Team: 14 moderators. 4 Developers.

Our Style: Comments are manually reviewed by a team of journalists before they are published. We moderate 11,000 comments per day.

Scale: We allow comments on less than 1/10th of our assets.

@BasseyE

Why all the trouble?

Good Habits: A large percentage of our subscribers use comments each month. Good business: Users who post comments are orders of magnitude more likely to purchase subscriptions.

Great reason to join: Comments are one of precious few reasons new arrivals have to register without subscribing.

@BasseyE

The Comments We WantArticulate, well-informed remarks that are

relevant to the article. We welcome criticism and advice and do not

tolerate personal attacks or incoherence.

@BasseyE

What We Feature - NYT Picks

● High Quality

● Broad Representation

● Back and Forth Conversation

● Personal Stories

● The Unexpected (humor, for example!)

@BasseyE

The Next Generation

Loves the quality: Every age demographic surveyed says that times comments are best characterized as higher quality/less angry. When they don’t read: Young people say it’s largely because they “only care what the reporter has to say.”

Want a simple experience: Do not find online annotation a particularly appealing prospect.

@BasseyE

Young readers are The only demographic group to say they read comments to help me compare my opinions with others rather than to add

value to the story.

@BasseyE

Young readers post comments to express themselves rather

than contribute to a topic.

@BasseyE

How do we build communities to scale if readers are moving toward self interest and away

from serving their peers?

@BasseyE

Our OpportunityOnline comments are a limited product.

We can use our community desk to re-imagine the comments section and create unique experiences that every reader will love.

@BasseyE