The largest American news story The New York Times informed its employees that it would get rid of the post of public editor. This role will now be performed by an expanded comment section, moderated by artificial intelligence.
The position of the public editor in the news publication is relatively new. It was opened in 2003 as a result of the discovery of plagiarism in the articles of Jayson Blair. The goal was to provide greater transparency for the subscribers of the newspaper. For 14 years, there were six such editors, but Liz Spayd, who holds this position now, will be the last.
"Our social network subscribers and online readers have come together to serve as a modern controller, more vigilant and stronger than ever one person could have become," wrote the owner of the publishing empire, Arthur Oaks Sulzberger Jr.
The New York Times will launch the so-called "Reader Center", which will be managed by the editor Hannah Inber. Through it, the publication staff will be able to "directly respond to feedback, questions, concerns, complaints and other public inquiries."
Commenting system The New York Times works on the basis of Conversation AI, an artificial intelligence system developed by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google. The neural network was trained in such a way as to find and tag the case of trolling and hate speech in the newspaper's comments section.
