LA Times 'wikitorial' gives editors red faces

[emad]

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Wednesday June 22, 2005
The Guardian

It was the boldest of innovations. A chance for the mainstream media to strike back against the upstarts of the online world. On Friday the Los Angeles Times - an unwieldy broadsheet newspaper - launched its "wikitorial", an interactive device allowing readers to contribute to and rewrite its editorial column.

"Do you see fatuous reasoning, a selective reading of the facts, a lack of poetry?" asked an introductory article in the paper. "Well, what are you going to do about it? You could send us an e-mail ... But today you have a new option: Rewrite the editorial yourself."

Trumpeting the experiment as "a constantly evolving collaboration among readers in a communal search for truth", the paper admitted that it faced potential disaster: "Like an arthritic old lady who takes to the dance floor ... the Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than to be hip. We acknowledge that possibility."
At the end of a 1,000-word editorial about the war in Iraq, online readers were invited to "Click here to Wiki this morning's editorial".

But by Sunday, readers were met with the following statement: "Where is the wikitorial? Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1511745,00.html

[atommom]

1. Gosh, who would have thought ...?

:dunce: