You’re right when you say

the two legal options seem to be to moderate everything, or go for plausible deniability and never look at anything until someone brings it to your attention.

For a news organisation to avoid ending up in court over comments on its stories or citizen journalism sites, these ARE the only legal options. There’s no half and half.

Moderating is time consuming in the extreme (even on a small regional paper that’s a full time job) and also requires 24 hour staffing (or disabling the facility overnight).

Some places I’ve worked don’t allow comments on 50 per cent of their stories because of concern about what people will say.

We have two choices: trust the citizen journalist to act responsibly (and therefore choose not to police them unless made aware of a problem). Offten other posters will correct and castigise for you.

Or: moderate everything. In the current economic climate, who’s going to pay for that? And doesn’t it go against the whole idea of iReport and citizen journalism?

CNN makes it very clear. iReport is unedited and unfiltered. It’s their tagline.

Making it CNN’s responsibilty to check everything posted is more likely to make them wash their hands of the whole project.

Surely the blame lies with the people who repeated it without checking?

You’re right when you say

the two legal options seem to be to moderate everything, or go for plausible deniability and never look at anything until someone brings it to your attention.

For a news organisation to avoid ending up in court over comments on its stories or citizen journalism sites, these ARE the only legal options. There’s no half and half.

Moderating is time consuming in the extreme (even on a small regional paper that’s a full time job) and also requires 24 hour staffing (or disabling the facility overnight).

Some places I’ve worked don’t allow comments on 50 per cent of their stories because of concern about what people will say.

We have two choices: trust the citizen journalist to act responsibly (and therefore choose not to police them unless made aware of a problem). Offten other posters will correct and castigise for you.

Or: moderate everything. In the current economic climate, who’s going to pay for that? And doesn’t it go against the whole idea of iReport and citizen journalism?

CNN makes it very clear. iReport is unedited and unfiltered. It’s their tagline.

Making it CNN’s responsibilty to check everything posted is more likely to make them wash their hands of the whole project.

Surely the blame lies with the people who repeated it without checking?