Mozilla is developing an open-source comments platform

If we ask you for a favorite comments platform, will you be able to name one, or will your answer be “I hate them all.” Folks at The New York Times and Washington Post believe they can make one better than the current options. So, they teamed up with Mozilla to make an open-source comments platform that newsrooms everywhere will be able download and use for free. The organizations claim it’s actually more like a “publishing platform for readers” than a comments system: users will be able to submit links, pictures and other media, as well as manage their online identities and track their contributions. They also mentioned that publications can use submitted content “for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions,” though they didn’t expound on what that means exactly. Sadly, you’ll have to wait a while to find out and take the platform for a spin, as the companies expect to spend two years to complete the project.

The New York Times and The Washington Post announced on Thursday that they had teamed up with Mozilla to develop a new platform to better manage their readers’ online comments and contributions. The platform will be supported by a grant of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which promotes innovation in journalism. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser and a nonprofit that works for open standards on the web, will help The Times and The Post build the technology for a platform tailored to news organizations. The platform, which will take approximately two years to complete, will eventually be available for other news organization to download free. “Everyone’s been talking for years about using the web in a better way without cheapening content, but simply adding a post by ‘anonymous’ is not a way to maintain the journalistic quality of any publication,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight’s chief executive. “There was a need to find a way to engage the audience in a way that enhances discussion.” Digital news organizations have long used reader-powered publishing platforms as a way to generate free content as well as to increase the time that readers spend on their websites. Some newspapers and magazines have been slow to develop these platforms because they worry about quality control. The New York Times, for example, screens every reader comment for tone and language before publishing.