Wikitorial Failure

On the LA Times and the Wikitorial:

A quote, I thought was worth calling out:

It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.

This is a classic failing of old school media thinking. Sure, folks could build on top of the Times' editorials, but then again, why would they? The reason folks build stuff is to build it together, and to do that, they have to know one another, have a shared set of mores, have a conversation that is already going.

A far better approach would have been to create a platform for readers to create their own communities. Leaders will emerge, voices will break out, and conversations will get started. Then the community itself will have a sense of ownership of the media, and begin to moderate out the trolls. It's one thing for the LA Times to kill the trolls - that feels like censorship. It's another for the community itself to do it.