Content Wise

Wired Magazine's Story Behind the Story

Wired.com has posted the final entry of its Storyboard blog, which followed the magazine's design and edit staff through the entire process of producing an article about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. For magazine wonks—you're reading this blog, aren't you?—it's an irresistible look over the shoulders of a smart creative team.

Playing off the self-referential, Möbius strip-style world of Kaufman's films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), senior editor Jason Tanz proposed tracking the story's development online. The blog would be a "profile of a profile."

Reading Storyboard grunt-by-grunt for a month might have proven a little tedious. We didn't. But looking over the whole collection of posts now that it's complete is fascinating.

Among the artifacts:

• Video of an early meeting exploring the idea with Tanz, creative director Scott Dadich (who is very into chronicling the creative process at his own design-oriented blog, The Process), senior editor Nancy Miller, design director Wyatt Mitchell, executive editor Bob Cohn, and editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
• The pitch memo that Tanz used to get approval of the magazine article. It's a nice parody of the Kaufmanesque paranoid internal monologue that Nicholas Cage delivered in Adaptation, a vehicle that Tanz rejected as too predictable for writing the actual article.
• Excerpts of e-mail messages about headlines and other display copy
• Written comments on the developing manuscript from editors and fact-checkers
• Design layouts in various stages of evolution.

As interesting as it is to magazine makers and journalists, we can't help wondering what Wired.com's main audience made of the Storyboard blog. And did Wired learn anything from this exercise that will shape its publishing plans online, in print, and in the Kaufman-like realm in between?

Assignment Zero Launches Pro-Am Journalism Site

An intriguing new species in the world of online collaborative journalism has just been hatched. Assignment Zero is an experiment in "crowdsourcing"--that is, enlisting large groups of contributors to research and report on news and trends. Its organizers describe the project as "pro-am" because it relies on professional as well as citizen journalists.

Here's how one of Assignment Zero's founders, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, explains the idea:

"Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?"

Last summer Rosen proposed a similar project called NewAssignment.net (which we wrote about here). He also popularized the phrase "the people formerly known as the audience" to describe how Web site users are increasingly in the driver's seat.

For editors and publishers who are trying to convince audiences to participate in their Web sites (and who isn't?), it will be instructive to stay tuned as this project confronts such challenges as:

• How to organize and supervise an enthusiastic but possibly unruly crowd of amateurs in a virtual newsroom.
• How to coach an enthusiastic but possibly unskilled crowd of amateurs to create raw copy of reasonable quality.
• How to assess the credibility of these citizens.
• How to attract enough professional volunteers to turn the crowd's contributions into coherent coverage. (And, incidentally, how to address the backlash from pros who don't appreciate this push toward unpaid labor.)

In fact, Rosen issued a help-wanted call on his blog yesterday: It seems they're getting plenty of "ams," but they could use a lot more "pros." If you'd like to watch the adventure of "open Web publishing" unfold from the front lines, here's how to get involved.

Publication Sites That Transcend Print -- Nature.com

The most important challenge facing publication-related Web sites--and still the most difficult one--is transcending their print roots.

We're not talking about simply repackaging the static text and graphics from a magazine or newspaper into a Web-friendly form. Naturally, print-derived content should be presented so Web audiences can scan it, easily navigate through it, e-mail copies to friends, print it out, and flexibly search archives. But these days, that's like saying a car really should include tires and a steering wheel.

Enter the Transcendent 10. This is the first in a series of postings in which we'll feature 10 publishers who are extending the "brand DNA" of their publications onto the Web in impressive ways. These savvy folks have considered the special powers of the Web (interactivity, data bases, always-on accessibility, quick turnaround time, multimedia, social networking...) and answered this question creatively:

What information/activity/service/mode of communication or participation would the Web allow us to offer our readers--stuff they'd kill to get--that we could never offer them in a print medium?

Nature.com
Nature.com, the first of our Transcendent 10, is the online extension of the prestigious scientific journal Nature and its cousins in the London-based Nature Publishing Group. This is a huge effort. If we tried describing it all, there would barely be anything left for the remaining nine "Transcendents" to demonstrate. So here's a rundown of some of Nature.com's most interesting elements...

The Audience Contributes (in more ways than one)

The tide of participatory media may be starting to erode the beaches of conventional news reporting. Media critic and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has proposed NewAssignment.net, a Web-based non-profit to fund independent-minded reporters through private contributions from anyone interested in their investigations. The (paying) audience would suggest article ideas; professional journalists would go out and report them.

So far Rosen's scheme is hypothetical, though it has already attracted a $10,000 pledge from Craig Newmark, creator of craigslist, the grass-roots mega-site of community listings and classified ads.

AskQuestions.org, launched by publishing consultant and PC Magazine co-founder Cheryl Woodard,  has been following a similar plan for quite a while. The site invites visitors to nominate and vote on questions, which journalists then investigate.

The Wisconsin State Journal's "Reader's Choice" poll asks its Web audience to decide which of five possible articles should appear on the front page of the following day's print edition. And there are many more instances of Web publishers collaborating with "the people formerly known as the audience," a group we'll be referring to with the handy acronym TPFKATA. (Rosen has some interesting things to say about this group.)

If you publish anything on the Web, you need to explore this trend--which some call "open source publishing"--and find ways to use it to your advantage. We'll keep pointing to notable examples as they surface.