Mozilla is developing an open-source comments platform

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.