The way that we generated the takes was by creating a Slack room and just allowing conversations and threads to build, sort of as happens on Reddit. Except it lacked the feature that we needed to build, which was ranking the takes that got the most responses. So ones that people got excited about were the ones that had like 15 replies or so, and we culled from that channel the takes that seemed to excite the room most.

Can you tell me a little more about how you decided whom to solicit opinions from?

WERTHEIM The chat room had mostly people from our section of the newsroom.

MA Critics who are used to taking positions on things.

WERTHEIM And this isn’t the first time that we’ve created an article or experience for our readers that draws opinions from across the company. So, we went with a few usual suspects from past round up-type coverage.

MA Can I ask you, I know you’re the one asking questions, [to Bonnie Wertheim] how did you edit out the ones that you didn’t like?

WERTHEIM The problem wasn’t so much the bad, infuriating takes as the ones that were so boring and cold. So the ones that we picked, as I said before, were ones that generated the most discussion within our Slack group.

MA Or are just funny.

WERTHEIM Or were just funny.

What is this project exploring about our culture and the way that we live today?

WERTHEIM I don’t know if everyone who worked on this would agree, but I see it as a piece of media criticism about the value of the take. Any of those takes on the list could have been fully written through opinion pieces if this were a different website, maybe. Or a few of them were takes that were written as articles essentially for The New York Times.