The position of Public Editor is a relatively new one at the venerable news publication. It was created in 2003 in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal as a means of facilitating greater transparency and accountability with the paper's subscribers. There have been six such editors in the 14 years since the position's creation, though Liz Spayd, the current (and rather unpopular) editor will be its last. "Our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog," publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote in a staff memo distributed on Wednesday, "more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be."

In its place, the NYT will install a "Reader Center" helmed by editor Hanna Ingber where the staff will be able to "respond directly to tips feedback, questions, concerns, complaints and other queries from the public," per the memo.

The NYT's commenting system is powered by Google Jigsaw's Conversation AI, a neural network that has been trained to find and flag trolling, hate speech and gratuitous shitposts in the paper's online comments sections. However, the system is currently only working on around ten percent of the sites articles. With Wednesday's announcement, the program will be expanded to nearly all of the publication's articles. "This expansion," Sulzberger Jr. wrote, "marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers."

Engadget reached out to Jigsaw for comment, which referred us to the New York Times. The NYT has not responded to comment as of the time of this article's publication.

You can read Sulzberger's full letter below: