Hey Dopers, I just launched Vaestro, a Voice Driven Social News Blog and I am looking for ideas and suggestions for what users feel are the most reasonable editorial policies and practices for a community powered news blog- keeping in mind the difference an audio experience makes- if any.
Basically, Vaestro is a Blog like Fark, Reddit, or Digg.com. Any user can submit a story and link. The best stories get on the front page. The unique thing about our site is that every story is a voice recorded audio soundbyte. Make sense?
Ok, here are the questions I sincerely want advice on:
FIRST: How should we determine what stories get on the front page?
- Fark uses editors.
- Reddit and Digg use community voting.
We do have a community post rating system, but since Audio is such an “In your face” medium, I am fairly certain we will keep the front page in the control of editors. We will have all story submission available deeper in the site for people to find though. Still, what do you think?
SECOND: How much “editing” is reasonable for a story we promote to the front page? When someone records and submits a story, we will not touch their audio. But what about: The Title, Description, and the link they choose?
I am pretty sure on Fark, Digg, and Reddit they don’t even fix typo’s in their users submissions. They just promote the story to the front page- good, bad, or ugly.
I see 2 problems with this policy. First, it may put ugly writing on the front page of our site- which we could easily fix with a little text editing. Second, what if a user submits a great story- but they choose a really low quality site as the news link?
If you used a site like this, would you find it offensive if the editors either: 1) Polished your text and description of your news submission. 2) Changed your chosen link to something we thought was better? How much editorial touching would you be comfortable with?
I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot by offending social news savvy users, but I also want to preserve the quality of our site front page experience.
All feedback welcome! Thanks.
Matt