• by Sara Guaglione , June 13, 2017

Top stories include those on the homepage with an article summary. Commenting is open for 24 hours after the article is published online and comments will be posted during business hours.

Until now, commenting was available only on about 10% of Times articles, due to the newspaper's small team of 14 moderators who had to manually review around 12,000 comments each day.

The Times is now adopting Moderator, a new system that will provide the newspaper's comment moderators with machine-learning technology. It was developed with Jigsaw, the tech incubator of Google parent company Alphabet. Moderator uses predictive models to help group similar comments, predicting the impact a comment might have on a conversation and allowing moderators to make faster decisions to maintain a useful conversation among readers.

Moderator will allow comments on approximately 25% of Times articles at launch. The goal is to have 80% of all Times stories open for comments by the end of the year.

At the end of last month, the Times announced it was eliminating the position of public editor and instead creating a “Reader Center” online hub. Here, readers can interact with the newspaper on editorial issues.

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote in an internal memo to staff at the time: “Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves."

Sulzberger also said the rise of social media has put more power in the hands of newspaper readers.

“Followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be," he wrote.