Bassey Etim
Community Desk Editor at The New York Times
Building The Community People Want
Bassey Etim, Community Desk Editor at The New York Times, shares what their research has revealed about the future of the community industry for news organizations.
When The Times started publishing comments, every comment section on every major news organization website had run amok. They had given the responsibility of moderation over to“the weird guy in the corner” and hoped that“the whole comment thing” wouldn’t get out of hand.
Bassey and his team decided they wanted to do something different. They set their standards for comments at the same editorial standard as the articles published in the paper.
For The Times, comments are not just about the people posting comments. They’re about serving the people who read the comments. That’s why the key metric they measure is not number of comments posted, but rather how many recommendations they get on each post– and it works. They get a huge number of response to their comments, and they’re only a portion of the content on the site as a whole.
And that’s not all. The team has shown that these high-quality comments drive subscriptions.
Want to know how? Bassey Etim breaks it down in his CMX Summit talk.
