Reporting the Community Beat: Practices for Moderating Online Discussion at a News Website

Due to challenges around low-quality comments and misinformation, many news outlets have opted to turn off commenting features on their websites. The New York Times (NYT), on the other hand, has continued to scale up its online discussion resources to reach large audiences. Through interviews with the NYT moderation team, we present examples of how moderators manage the first ∼24 hours of online discussion after a story breaks, while balancing concerns about journalistic credibility. We discuss how managing comments at the NYT is not merely a matter of content regulation, but can involve reporting from the "community beat" to recognize emerging topics and synthesize the multiple perspectives in a discussion to promote community. We discuss how other news organizations-including those lacking moderation resources-might appropriate the strategies and decisions offered by the NYT. Future research should investigate strategies to share and update the information generated about topics in the news through the course of content moderation.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.