Vincent Maher has a fascinating transcript up on his blog of an interview he did with Hilton Tarrent, the Moneyweb production editor. There are some interesting Q&A's regarding the redevelopment of Moneyweb and how they handle moderation of reader comments (always an issue on South African sites), but the really good stuff comes in when they start discussing the reader response to the recent Fidentia debacle, which Moneyweb has covered extensively:
HT: The response by our readers has been unprecedented. We have spoken at length internally about it, because we were caught by surprise. a large chunk of our readers during the early days were Fidentia employees (there were 1100 of them)
VM: Do you think this is because people were finding out things for the first time about the company they work for, but from an outside source?
HT: Yes. That was definitely a major part of it. we pretty much know this because we had letters, emails, phone calls, comments under stories from staff members
VM: So the Fidentia ship suddenly sprung a thousand leaks…
VM: What was the feeling among your team as all of this was happening?
HT: Yeah. One of our major achievements was to get a staff member to write for us from the inside (he also spoke to us on radio): Small voice inside Fidentia speaks
Another highlight comes later on in the transcript:
HT: I think the most interesting thing we saw was the creation of original content by our readers, who then posted this as comments
VM: Like short articles?
HT: There were those, but users were also creating images, they pinpointed Arthur Brown’s house on Google maps, etc and then posted these to imageshack, with the links posted as comments, here and here.
These are really great examples of what happens when you let your users take part in the conversation. Hilton points out some of the problems they faced, such as readers impersonating other readers, requests for content to be deleted and the like, but by and large there was a huge positive effect for Moneyweb, and they managed to get leads and further insight into the developing story. People also used Moneyweb and the comments system in ways that Moneyweb had not anticipated, and instead of shutting down comments and restricting what people could do they ran with it and came out on top. Its a great lesson for any media organisation.
Source: Vincent Maher - Media in Transition » Fidentia scandal sparks an excellent case study in social media on Moneyweb