Taking a page from Wikipedia, the LA Times tried a cool experiment: Editors wrote a 1,000-word editorial on the war in Iraq and asked readers to improve it. They could add their own opinions and edit what was already there without any interference from the editorial staff.
Yet the Times’ brave new project died after just too days when bad apples posted hard-core porn and language you normally don’t see in any newspaper.
Times staffers blame the demise on readers of Slashdot, which pointed users to the Wikitorial Saturday night.
“Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious,” said Michael Newman, deputy editorial page editor. “We were taking stuff down as soon as it went up and staving them off. Finally we had to go to bed. Someone called the newsroom a little bit before 4 a.m. and said there’s something bad on your Web site, and so we just took the whole site down.”
