It's a brave news organisation that lets its readers comment freely on articles. The risk of a libel action, particularly when the story concerns an ongoing court case, is enough to put most of them off. And that's just the legal side. Anyone who has posted anything mildly controversial on a popular weblog will know that readers can become VERY, VERY ANGRY - if not downright abusive - when left to their own devices. The result is tiresome, depressing and leaves all the participants furious.
So when the LA Times tentatively said it would be inviting readers to comment on and edit an editorial about the Iraq war, as my colleague Sarah Left noted last week, a lot of media executives were watching - and as Claire Cozens reports, their worst fears were realised: "Within hours one user had managed to change the headline on several pages to read 'Fuck USA'." Despite the best efforts of moderators, and a requirement for posters to register, the "wikitorial" eventually had to be taken off the site, thanks to what the paper describes as vandalism.
The Guardian's director of digital publishing, Simon Waldman, talks about our own experiments with reader interaction here. Should Guardian Unlimited go where the LA Times now fears to tread? Or, as Amy Gahran of Poynter.org suggests here, do we need to be a bit smarter about the kinds of articles we let readers edit?
