The largest American news story The New York Times informed its employees that it would get rid of the post of public editor. This role will now be performed by an expanded comment section, moderated by artificial intelligence.

The position of the public editor in the news publication is relatively new. It was opened in 2003 as a result of the discovery of plagiarism in the articles of Jayson Blair (Jayson Blair). The goal was to provide greater transparency for the newspaper's subscribers. For 14 years, there were six such editors, but Liz Spayd, who holds this position now, will be the last.

"Our subscribers in social networks and readers on the Internet came together to serve as a modern controller, more alert and stronger than ever one person could have become," wrote the owner of the publishing empire Arthur Oaks Sulzberger Jr.. (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

The New York Times will launch the so-called "Reader Center", which will be managed by the editor Hannah Inber (Hanna Ingber). Through it, the publication staff will be able to "directly respond to feedback, questions, concerns, complaints and other public inquiries".

Commenting system The New York Times works on the basis of Conversation AI, an artificial intelligence system developed by Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary. The neural network was trained in such a way as to find and tag the case of trolling and hate speech in the newspaper's comments section.

The system is distributed approximately on 10% of publications on a site. But now the program will act in almost all articles and news.

"This expansion marks a significant change in how we serve our readers," wrote Sulzberger.