Morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

Comment moderators should focus more on hate speech than profanity, a new study suggests — www.niemanlab.org

Get past the well-duh nature of the headline and this article on Nieman Lab has a couple of tantalising nuggets of wisdom for newspapers. We've long known that moderating comments is a challenge - even the Times and the FT have told me in the past that choosing how to police its under-article comments sections are a real headache - but deciding exactly where the line is drawn can be difficult.

This article, summarising a new study by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, breaks down what the public sees as worthy of removal. Profanity - of which we are avowed fans at Media Voices - is lower down the list of criteria for removing a comment than hate speech. That makes sense, though what is classed as 'hate speech' is obviously harder to determine.

What's really interesting though, is what impact those removals have on the relationship between audience and outlet: "In the U.S. and the Netherlands, participants found moderators removing hate speech to be more trustworthy than those who removed profanity."

‘We want to differentiate ourselves from television’: News outlets tossing old approaches to covering crime — www.washingtonpost.com

This is an interesting one and it's tricky to square with the attitude to covering local court news in the UK. For the Washington Post Erik Wemple argues that news outlets should refrain from covering petty misdemeanours as it adds little value to subscribers and - crucially - is a weight around the neck of the people written about in perpetuity.

The New York Times and The Athletic end acquisition talks — www.theinformation.com

Bad news for The Athletic. After a previous failure to merge with Axios the sports specialist subscription service's potential acquisition by the NYT has fallen apart. We still think it would have been a smart get-subscribers-quick scheme for the NYT but reportedly the parties couldn't come to terms on a price. So where now for The Athletic, which is seemingly desperate to get snapped up?

GB News, week 1: It takes until Tuesday to go full wingnut — www.irishtimes.com

As referred to in this week's episode (see below). Writing for Irish Times Patrick Freyne makes the case that GB News is failing even by its own low standards. Janine Gibson, meanwhile, argues that we shouldn't be talking about the channel at all as that's exactly what it wants to fuel its culture war-based revenue model.

This week's episode:

Defector's VP of Revenue & Operations Jasper Wang on growing an employee-owned newsbrand — voices.media

This week we hear from Jasper Wang, VP of Revenue & Operations for Defector Media. Defector was formed after a mass staff exodus from former GO Media property Deadspin after an internal dispute about who knew its audience best. Defector is now an employee-owned and operated news site that has introduced measures specifically to ensure its staff have a say in the business, even as they write for its audience.

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