I really know more about Ryan Singel than I should.
I know he works for Wired News. I’ve seen pictures of him. Read his blog and I’ve even rifled through his reporter’s notebook — something you can get your fingers sliced off for in an actual newsroom. I know reporters who teach themselves foreign languages or stenographer’s shorthand to keep other journalists from stealing their stuff.
In Old School journalism there are no Share-Alike licenses. There aren’t even any “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine” licenses. Even among friends.
To paraphrase Bono, “Every artist is a cowboy, every journalist a thief.”
But Ryan, and quite a few others like him are a little more magnanamous. A good journalist knows there’s always one more call he could have made, one more news nugget he could have found. One more something left out there somewhere that he has a nagging feeling he should have looked into.
So with Wired’s permission (and probably a sigh of relief from the overworked copydesk) Ryan has posted his unedited story, along with his notes on the Wired Wiki for anyone and everyone to add, subtract, resort, rearrange, copedit, correct and generally help Ryan and the Wired staff whip this Wiki article into shape.
Think you can write better headlines than the boys at the New York Post? Well have a go with Ryan’s story via Wired’s headline contest. My current favorite is “What a Wiki World,” but you know that could change. It seems everybody wants to get into the act. But this noble experiment is almost over. Wired says unless this experiment in collaborative journalism is “a total distaster” you can see how Ryan’s story turns out — with a little help from his online friends — on September 7.
Dead tree newsrooms used to pride themselves on their collaborative enviornments. If you’ve ever been in a newsroom or even if you’ve just rented “All the President’s Men,” you’ll notice there are no offices (except for editors, who don’t actively write anything), just wide open spaces and a profound lack of privacy. This is supposed to foster a collaborative spirit among journalists, which on occasion it does. On the good days, you can get somebody to polish your lede, come up with a synomym for a word you’ve already used six times in one paragraph, or give you the phone number of that guy they know whose girlfriend works at a place that might be good info for your story.
However, most of the time, what you get in a real world newsroom is the special privilege of listening to the business reporter across from you planning her wedding, monitor the progress of the special projects editor’s fantasy baseball team or watch the assistant food editor adding new items to her eBay store.
In short, not the most collaborative of environments. But then here comes Ryan, some guy from Wired News who wants to do a story on Wikis. He shows you his first draft, hands you his notes and a copy of the Wired Style Manual and asks you very nicely if you could help him out. He trusts you. He beleives that you are as interested in this wiki thing as he is and you will check his facts, his syntax, his spelling and his hyperlinks and help him write a really good story. Sure, there might be a few wingnuts out there who might want to mess with Ryan’s story, but on the flip side there are people who will come right behind them and fix everything that was undone.
Right now, today, Wired Wiki looks like exactly what it is — a science project. Can a reporter really rely on strangers, even –gasp– ordinary people to collaborate with him on a story? Could this possibly be scalable to the point where collaborative journalism becomes part of the media culture right up there with “who, what, when, where and why?”
Personally, I don’t think so. At least not right now. Although a Maureen Dowd Wiki would be an awful lot of fun(let’s all try to think of a new nickname for Rummy, shall we?), not all journalism needs to be or should be collaborative. But for every Maureen Dowd there are hundreds of beat reporters, citizen jounalists even guys at big outfits like Ryan Singel, ready to rely on the kindness of strangers to help him put his fingers square on the pulse of his subject.
I am sure there is a place for collaborative journalism in the future of the medium. I’ll be very interested to see other projects like this one and its eventual incorporation into mainstream and not-so-mainstream media.
The results of Ryan’s science project will be in Wired News on Sept. 7.