• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, June 20, 2005

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times launched a "wikitorial"--a site for people who thought they could improve on the paper's editorials. By Sunday night, the paper shut down the feature. "Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material," states a note on the site.

The wiki idea was old-hat for the Internet world, but nearly revolutionary for the old media culture--which is based on the model of editors pushing content to readers. For the wiki, the Times invited readers to post their own, new and improved versions of the Times editorials on the site. The reader-written versions would then be hosted on the site--following the model popularized by Wikipedia, the open-content encyclopedia.

The paper hoped to encourage reader interaction, deputy editorial pages editor Michael Newman told OnlineMediaDaily last week. He said that editors had no plans to moderate the entries, but would monitor them after the fact.

Complications occurred almost immediately. By Friday afternoon, someone had changed several headlines to “Fuck USA,” according to a report in Editor & Publisher. The Times removed the new, reader-contributed headlines that same day.

It's not yet clear what specifically sparked the removal--but the shutdown after just two days points to at least one difficulty newspapers might have in adapting to the online world. Traditional media tends to have high standards in terms of what content's considered acceptable to publish.

More and more, blogs and other Web sites depend on readers creating their own content. The best blogs are conversations, media entrepreneur John Battelle recently said at the OMMA West conference. But the problem with conversations is that participants sometimes say offensive things. Bloggers, at least some of the most popular ones, tend to be thick-skinned, and, judging from some of the posts on blogs like Wonkette and Gawker, very little is out-of-bounds.

Whether newspapers can convince readers to contribute content in a way that meets the papers' corporate standards remains to be seen.