This morning, NYT op-ed columnist Paul Krugman offered his own plaintive whine about his employer's financial troubles: the NYT can't seem to afford a comments moderater for the weekends.This tragic budgetary circumstance has forced the Nobel Prize-winning economist to have to go through all those crazy blog comments he gets himself!
Under the headline "Housekeeping Note," Krugman lodged his complaint on his "Conscience of a Liberal" blog at 9:11 a.m. today:
Comments here are moderated; the Times doesn’t have anyone to moderate them on weekends, and I can only do so much myself. And it appears that recent posts have generated an amazing number of comments — there were around 1200 in the queue when I logged in this morning, relatively few of them obscene or threatening, as far as I can tell.
So if you’re wondering why your comment hasn’t appeared yet, that’s the explanation.
We've emailed the NYT to see if something is being done to help Krugman out of his overload.
Come on, guys. Krugman delivers you more publicity with one column than the rest of the paper combined! Get the poor guy a comments moderator, so he can get back to the important work of telling Barack Obama what to do.
2 comments:
Long ago, I lived next door to a girl who was the assistant for Tom Wicker. She said it was a deadend job and her only real responsibility was to act as a buffer between the copy editors and Wicker. The copy editors would fuss about some construction, send a new version to the assistant who would then feed it to Wicker who would then, 9 times out of 10, turn around and say "No." She would have to feed this back to the copy editors and everyone would play out this theater until they were too tired to care about the commas any longer.
I'm glad to see that the assistants now have something a bit more real to do.
Here's an idea. Why not have the assistants work on the days the columnists publish -- Kristoff has the same complaints -- and then take a day off during the week when the columnist is coming up with another serving of wisdom.
Best to use automated moderating filters to avoid the consequences of over-moderation.
Post a Comment