"New York Times picks an AI moderator over a Public Editor."

That's the headline at Engadget in a piece by Andrew Tarantola about the elimination of the "Public Editor" position at the NYT. I've already said a few words — at the end of this earlier post — about this change at the NYT, but I want to continue the discussion here.

What's the "AI moderator"? The Engadget headline is very confusing since it made me think the Times had artificial intelligence that could substitute for the role the Public Editor had played, which was to monitor the journalism in the newspaper. But, reading on, I see that the AI is about culling the comments:

The NYT's commenting system is powered by Google Jigsaw's Conversation AI, a neural network that has been trained to find and flag trolling, hate speech and gratuitous shitposts in the paper's online comments sections. However, the system is currently only working on around ten percent of the sites articles. With Wednesday's announcement, the program will be expanded to nearly all of the publication's articles. "This expansion," Sulzberger Jr. wrote [in a staff memo], "marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers."

So in addition to getting the Public Editor out of the way, the NYT is filtering out the contributions of readers who might push back against the distortions, omissions, and fake news. That's pretty interesting, considering that Sulzberger's staff memo also justified eliminating the Public Editor on the ground that readers were performing the role of keeping the NYT principled and honest.

From the memo (which appears in full at the link):

The responsibility of the public editor – to serve as the reader's representative – has outgrown that one office. Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves....

Wow! Did you see the sleight of hand? The public editor was "the reader's representative," but now "we... all" should answer to the readers directly. Then who is representing the readers? You have no intermediary. You have the unrepresented readers, trying to make their questions and concerns heard with no surrogate on the inside, and you're also systematically cutting them off, using automation to distance them even further.

The public editor position, created in the aftermath of a grave journalistic scandal, played a crucial part in rebuilding our readers' trusts by acting as our in-house watchdog....

So you got that taken care of? You think we trust you now? Was it all only about mopping up after the scandal, and that's far enough behind you now? What matters isn't just whether we trust you — and obviously not all of us do — but whether you are actually doing an excellent job according to the best principles of journalism. But I hear you saying, that's good enough trust for now. Or even: The public editor brought some trust but also mistrust, and when trust/mistrust balance cut the wrong way, we ended it.

Here's the pitch from Sulzberger that times have changed and the internet is all the pushback needed to keep the NYT honest and principled:

[T]oday, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.

It's not as though the Public Editor was cutting off the flow of criticism, hording it in a single office. You speak of the "modern" world, but you're acting as though the readers' input comes in via paper mail! The Public Editor selected whatever she saw fit to focus on in a column that appeared regularly, but everybody else at the NYT could also see the criticism. If you're just saying that you lazily relied on her and looked to her to answer the complaints, then you are admitting she was not "the reader's representative," she was your representative, saving you the trouble of dealing with the critics. But now you say you want to take on the very role you seem to admit you were avoiding bothering with. Why should we believe that you will take this role seriously if you didn't care about it when you had the Public Editor?

We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform. Currently, we open only 10 percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.

I've been bothered for a long time that the NYT withholds comments on many articles that need pushback. So now they are going to have more, which is good, but it's still not all, only "most." And it's a bit deceptive to say that the expansion is made possible by Google. All Google is providing is the ability to limit the comments through some kind of automated process. They could have had comments on more or all of the articles, but they chose where to have them, and they apparently still plan to do that, even as they open up more articles to comments, which they're doing because they've built in more power to filter what people try to put up.

We will work hard to curate and respond to the thousands of daily comments....

But what will you work hard to "curate"? What is the standard of what you're keeping out? You won't be revealing that. Maybe you won't even see it. It's the robot's job.

... but comments will form just one bridge between The Times and our audience. We also, of course, engage with readers around the globe on social media, where we have tens of millions of followers. 

We'll see what that means. I'll do my part in social media. I do as much as I can. Who does more?!

We're given the names of 2 editors who will have a special responsibility. Phil Corbett leads a team that "listens and responds to reader concerns and investigates requests for corrections." And  Hanna Ingber will work "to make our report ever more transparent and our journalists more responsive." This seems to be internal work that is not itself transparent. there's no more Public Editor column pointing out problems like lack of transparency, but Corbett and Ingber might make the paper "ever more transparent." How will we know?