'The plan is to expand My Telegraph and roll out more community features in all our channels'

Why would any newspaper let the audience in to sully its good name with cheap-talk and knee-jerk hoots?

Letting the audience in is fraught with complications, yet newspapers are increasingly seeing their roles as both providers of news and facilitators of the audience conversation.

Ceri Radford, deputy communities editor at the Telegraph Media Group, told Journalism.co.uk that as part of this drive the Telegraph.co.uk intends to roll its MyTelegraph personalisation features out across the rest of its online channels and increase the community features on the site.

However, giving the audience a greater voice - and getting that voice right - can be a tricky business.

"Two years ago, when this started to take off, we could've let everything go up straight away, giving us more comments and our traffic a boost," Radford told Journalism.co.uk.

"But it's important in terms of protecting the brand and the persona of the site to have some moderation in advance or tools for community management.

"We're not just opening the floodgates, even if that does dampen a gain in traffic."

The moderation of comments on the site's blogs, My Telegraph section and online articles is the responsibility of the five-strong communities team, who operate a two-tier moderation system for the site.

Comments on news stories and opinion pieces are screened by the team before they are put live, while retrospective action is taken on blog and My Telegraph comments, which appear automatically after a user has registered.

These different approaches are tailored to the areas of the site they police, explains Radford.

Pre-moderation avoids the risk of something offensive appearing beneath a popular news story, which might not be taken down immediately.

In contrast, the delayed moderation tactic works for what Radford describes as the more community orientated comment areas like My Telegraph, which are becoming in part self-moderating.

"On My Telegraph there's much more interaction between users... there are people on there who are regular bloggers who we trust and then if they complain about others comments we know to take it seriously and act on it," said Radford.

Yet, for some, there is a big distinction between blog communities and comments on news articles.

"Commenting on news stories is a very narrow activity, it doesn't build community," explains Robert Marcus, director of independent moderation service Chat Moderators.

"It might build loyalty for a website and interactivity to some degree, but it only appeals to a limited segment of people."

Radford, however, says that it was not an active decision to foster a community of commenters away from the site's news channels.

Indeed, the plan is to use My Telegraph's community model in other parts of the site.

"Eventually the plan is to expand more of My Telegraph and roll out more community features in the rest of our channels.

"We want to integrate it better with other sections of the paper, so that we can grow communities around different sections and hopefully bring in new people," she says.

Encouraging new commenters, says Radford, is key in making the comment space of news sites an area for debate.

But, she adds, Telegraph.co.uk has veered away from a principle of 'active moderation' - seeding comments and encouraging users to contribute - instead using its print product to promote online discussions among users.

The typical reactions of a Telegraph reader to stories on topics such as immigration and Labour can be relied upon to spark online debate, says Radford.

Pretty good at moving the notoriously web-shy Telegraph offline readers to the web edition too.

While the role of the Telegraph.co.uk moderator is not to steer comments, Radford admits that maintaining an objective stance towards the process is 'incredibly difficult'.
 
"We aim to allow through as much as we can, but a lot of our decisions are subjective by their very nature. We are constantly debating the point at which a comment crosses the line between being controversial and being overtly offensive.

"We get as many complaints saying we're letting anything through and it's irresponsible, as we do accusing us of censorship and stamping down on people's right to freedom of speech - so as long as we get complaints in both directions we're doing okay."

According to Radford the intention is to eventually move towards a system that involves the site's 'community' more in the moderation process.

"We're not going to make our readers moderators, but they'll be able to build up a reputation so that they can contribute more directly to moderation."

However, relinquishing some control to the readers is as far as the site is willing to go when it comes to outsourcing the moderation process - a deal similar to Topix's recent partnership with MediaNews Group in the US is not in the offing at Telegraph.co.uk. 

"It [outsourcing comment moderation] is something we've looked at in the past, but there wasn't a sizeable enough cost benefit to make it worthwhile.

"It's beneficial having it in house, as we can feed comments through to the newsdesk as feedback or to be followed up as potential leads.

"Moderation is an integrated part of what we do, and for us it makes sense to keep it in house because the readers are part of the newsmaking process."

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