Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
Six months ago Wired magazine got back its Wired.com website (the two were separated in a complicated publishing deal in the late 1990s). They're now planning a relaunch, which may happen by February or so. Therefore, lots of discussions and thinking in the newsroom about what a media organization might/should do online to address the new participatory/transparent environment. Editor Chris Anderson elaborates on them in this post. Here a summary:
1) Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal "about" pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so.
2) Show what we're working on. Who knows, perhaps other people will have good ideas, too.
3) "Process as Content"*. Why not share the reporting as it happens? After you've woven together enough of the threads to have a semi-coherent draft, why not ask your readers to help edit it?
4) Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they're commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they're submitted?
5) Let readers decide what's best. Measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page.
6) Wikifiy everything. What if we published every story on a wiki platform, so they could evolve over time, just like Wikipedia itself?
Some of these reflect what I wrote in a previous post about what newsmagazines should do online. In a follow-up post Chris nuances a few things ("this doesn't apply to all kind of stories", "the writing itself is best done as a solo effort", "these techniques works better for relatively short-form web media than they do for the print magazine"). The point I'm most skeptical about is number 3, because the process risks to trump the content. However, Chris believes (I agree, except for number 3) that for all the six tactics above, the possible upsides outweigh the downsides. "But if I'm wrong the consequences could be serious" (for Wired's business), he writes. So they may "try these experiments in a limited way first" - a "beta" approach applied to journalism, in a way, launching something and seeing the feedback and adjusting along the way without putting the whole house at risk. It will be interesting to watch.
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