Thought Leader publishes the occasional brain fart

Matthew Buckland, who co-founded Mail & Guardian Online’s blog aggregator, Amatomu, and group blog, Thought Leader (but who recently left the M&G to take up the position of General Manager for Publishing and Social Media at 24.com), wrote recently that the best model for citizen journalism was “user-generated content (UGC) with controls from a closed or select group of writers”.

“The key to harnessing user-generated content is combining it with a traditional media editorial model. It’s a way media can delve into the world of citizen media but still retain quality assurance. The creation of the Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog platform (www.thoughtleader.co.za) has been an example of this very theory in practice.”

He also said that media “should not be ashamed at being ruthless about only publishing quality content”.

“For example, racist, sexist content in the form of articles or comments, or even comments considered “stupid” should be deleted with extreme prejudice.” [my emphasis]

However, it appears that the Editors at Thought Leader aren’t always ruthless and, occasionally, they publish a brain fart. My colleague, Gareth van Onselen, discusses an extreme example in the guest post that follows:

What happened to Thought Leader’s Quality Control?

By: Gareth van Onselen

How do you identify a poor piece of writing?

Have you tried Google Docs?

A Report from the FNF’s International Academy for Leadership (IAF) in Gummersbach:

I was really blown away by some of my classmates in our New Media workshop this week. They put together some very funny ads for Google Docs as part of their group assignment to report back to the class on this topic.