Transparent Media and Wikify Everything

Chris Anderson is on a roll about six tactics for transparent media:

• Show who we are
• Show what we're working on
• "Process as Content"
• Privilege the crowd
• Let readers decide what's best
• Wikifiy everything interesting thought experiment is not only would this work for Wired, or a media company, but would it work for any company. Expounding upon the reactions to his post, Chris clarifies:

  These techniques works better for relatively short-form web media than they do for the print magazine. That's mostly because magazine features tend to be long (2,500-10,000 words) and wrapped up in a package heavy with art and design. Long-form journalism is more about narrative and story arc, which is really best done as a close collaboration between a writer, editor and designer.

  Actually, an interesting question is if you could make the short form more like the long form. Many a time have I been interviewed by a writer and then had a photo shoot with someone that had little or no idea what the article was about. Photo editors don't give a lot of art direction, especially to freelancers. Wired features are more collaborative than the norm, but I have to ask if tighter collaboration could be fostered for short form stories. But the interesting question to ask with any process, especially an ad hoc process, is what would happen if we increase the scale and transparency through a wiki? Chris suggests this is possible by wikifying everything. But I'd suggest that for most newsrooms there is a preliminary step of internal transparency, and then involving freelancers. Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Ross Mayfield's Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.