The Editor's Eye

The journalistic curation of social media content from platforms like Facebook and YouTube or from commenting systems is underscored by an imperative for publishing accurate and quality content. This work explores the manifestation of editorial quality criteria in comments that have been curated and selected on the New York Times website as "NYT Picks." The relationship between comment selection and comment relevance is examined through the analysis of 331,785 comments, including 12,542 editor's selections. A robust association between editorial selection and article relevance or conversational relevance was found. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for reducing journalistic curatorial work load, or scaling the ability to examine more comments for editorial selection, as well as how end-user commenting experiences might be improved.