December 13th, 2006
Chris Anderson’s Sober Assessment of Openness in Publishing Hints At Real Innovation
Chris Anderson of Wired has written what may be the most sober and balanced (i.e. ideology-free) assessment I’ve ever read of the upside and downside of 2.0 openness in publishing, or what he calls “radical transparency.” Here’s a sample:
3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India? (This may sound ridiculous, but it’s exactly what wire services such as the AP have long done–they update their stories with each new fragment of information). After you’ve woven together enough of the threads to have a semi-coherent draft, why not ask your readers to help edit it? (We did it here, and it worked great). And while you’re at it, let them write the headlines and subheads, not just for the site but also the punchier ones for the RSS feed and the one that has to work with the art for the magazine.
Upside: Open participation can make stories better–better researched, better thought through and deeper. It also can crowdsource some of the work of the copy desk and editors. And once the story is done and published, the participants have a sense of collective ownership that encourages them to spread the word.
Risk: Curating the process can quickly hit diminishing returns. Writers end up feeling like a cruise director, constantly trying to get people to participate. And all the other risks of the item above.
Reading Chris’ assessment of the “Upside” and “Risk” of each element of transparency, I’m inclined to agree with his conclusion: “Needless to say, in all these cases I think the upsides outweigh the downsides.” More importantly, Chris sounds like he’s hot on the trail of real innovation, rather than pablum ideology.
It’s amazing how much you can move the 2.0 ball forward when you strip out the ideology and just think it through.
Here’s my first prediction for 2007 — some “old media” brands, which many in new media have already counted out of the game, will from a standing start leapfrog past some new media brands in the race for innovation. 2006 has been filled with a lot of ideology and vague formulations trying to pass for real innovation.
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I think we are going too far with these fancy ideas.
A rebuttal to the idea can be read at MediaVidea.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2006/12/radical-transparency-it-is-story.html
Chris Anderson Calls for “Radical Transparency” in MediaScott Karp / Publishing 2.0: Chris Anderson’s Sober Assessment of Openness in Publishing Hints At Real Innovation
like me. Same with deciding what’s best and wikifying. I don’t need to ‘let’ readers to this, they can do it on their own (and I provide the RSS feed and licensing to enable it). Of course, I don’t publish a magazine, either. Hm, maybe I should… Via Scott Karp. [Link] [Tags: Open Access, Web Logs] [Comment]
[…] Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing: I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See the sidebar of B2 bloggers on the right, or go here.) But Wired’s radical transparency would help me—radically—when I make strategic decisions about how to put my magazine together. That’s because one of the most powerful attributes of my medium—the monthly magazine—is the element of surprise. What Chris is describing might indeed be wonderful online media, and yes, surprising to watch as it’s being created. But I bet the PAPER product that rolls off the printing press months later would have a much smaller audience than it does now—and would be creamed by the competition. […]
The fundamental problem with this approach is a misunderstanding, not of how online communities can, but how they almost always do. At first things seem to be great, but before long the community itself becomes a rival to the content, and in-jokes, rebellions, personal animosities, etc. come to the fore.
Take the comments section of Digg, for example. It’s largely an impenetrable mess of people who don’t understand the topic, snipe at each other, post worthless in-jokes and flavor-of-the-hour memes, etc.
Wikipedia suffers to this from some extent as well, although it’s saved by the facts that the site has no commercial ambitions, and that it’s overall function is different from a magazine or similar content product.
I think it’s great that Anderson wants to do this, and I hope he’s able to cultivate a fantastic community. It will be an uphill battle, however, to create a community that legitimately and consistently adds value to magazine-format articles and business model.
Chris Anderson’s Sober Assessment of Openness in Publishing Hints At Real Innovation » Publishing 2.0
This feels like Jaron Lanier’s online collectivism. Chris’s point that the community should ‘edit’ the articles through ‘crowdsourcing’ seems to miss the most obvious point that there seem to be no qualification or reputation systems confirming that the ‘community’ is the right person for the job.
The only qualification one seems to need in the future world of content generation is interest, not aptitude, at least if the community is not creating their own blogs where value will be determined by organic growth in readership. In this case, Chris is proposing that a premium brand like Wired open itself up to a large community of self-selecting people. They’re probably self-selecting becuase 1. they don’t have real jobs or 2. they couldn’t get editorial jobs at traditional magazines based on lack of qualification or experience.
It’s the same phenomena in Wikipedia.
Web 3.0 needs to be about qualified content. The community is not an end unto itself and the many don’t automatically trump the individual simply because they are faceless.
[…] Chris Anderson’s Sober Assessment of Openness in Publishing Hints At Real Innovation “Here’s my first prediction for 2007 — some “old media†brands, which many in new media have already counted out of the game, will from a standing start leapfrog past some new media brands in the race for innovation. 2006 has been filled with a lo (tags: open publicmedia ddcgroup web20) […]