A language with over a dozen of dialects
Austria’s largest newspaper Kronen Zeitung is known for its opinionated readership. Their readers are well engaged with the news outlet, usually referred to as “Krone”. They are attentive to daily events, such as national and international politics, sports, business, and lifestyle. The readers voice their opinion by commenting on and discussing these topics.
“Krone.at is a reader-centered online-newspaper with a clear focus on improving the user experience by utilizing our user-generated-content”, says Krone’s Head of Community Peter Zeilinger, “we have over half a million monthly comments, which were previously manually moderated prior to publishing. The workload was high and required attendance during late evening hours and weekends. This made it impossible to leave our comment sections open 24/7.”
To keep the audience engagement quality at a high point and to publish comments faster, Krone started to look for an automated content moderation solution. But where to find one for Austrian German, which includes over a dozen of dialects?
“Extremely satisfied”
Utopia offered Krone a pilot where they could test its AI-based moderation service to validate its real-life benefits. Krone took some old comments and their human moderation decisions from their database and gave them to Utopia as training data for a tailor-made AI model. Utopia deployed the automated moderation solution for Krone in just two weeks.
“We were extremely satisfied with the results, and we decided to sign a contract with Utopia already before the pilot period was finished. Switching to production was simple, since nothing needed to be changed as the pilot was already of production quality and production ready.”
More comments, increased engagement and higher community stickiness. Utopia AI Moderator saves approximately 75% of Krone’s previous workload, as the routine work is now automated and the human moderators can concentrate on the small number of tricky cases, where community managers are needed to make the final decision. Automatically accepted comments are now published in real time, and the majority is published without delay. To Krone’s positive surprise, this has led to more comments, increased engagement and higher community stickiness.
“Using Utopia AI, we have even been able to increase the quality of our human moderation by using the feedback, which the AI system provides.”
More time for community journalism
In a July 2021 Journalism.co.uk interview, community editor Peter Zeilinger described the challenge of handling around 500,000 comments a month, including Austrian dialects and changing expressions.
Training drew on more than four million previous comments and moderation decisions. At the time, the system handled roughly three quarters of submissions, leaving borderline cases for people. Faster publication was associated with an approximately 25% increase in engagement.
The benefit extended beyond speed. Less exposure to harmful comments gave the team more time for reader conversations and editorial feedback. Human review, appeals and continued training remained important to correcting mistakes.
Read the interview
The article explains how automation supported community journalists rather than replacing them, with Kronen Zeitung investing in its team as participation grew.