Guardian reporting:
Few documents are more carefully guarded in newspaper offices than
the newslist. The mixture of what's coming up and what the editors are
hoping for can be so valuable that rivals have even been known to pay for a sneaky look.
Some newsrooms I've worked in have relied on code words to describe
really juicy stories. Often, it can be an embarrassingly blank sheet of
paper – best kept hidden, even from the boss.
The idea of giving
this information away before publication might therefore seem to be
putting digital dogma before common sense. Just because the internet
theoretically allows journalists to give readers a peek behind the
curtain by sharing the list with them does not make it a good idea.
We suspect otherwise though at the Guardian.
What if readers were able to help newsdesks work out which stories were
worth investing precious reporting resources in? What if all those
experts who delight in telling us what's wrong with our stories after
they've been published could be enlisted into giving us more clues
beforehand? What if the process of working out what to investigate
actually becomes part of the news itself?
It might seem a minority
pursuit, but the experience of covering breaking news already suggests
otherwise. Like many websites, we are discovering some of our best-read
stories are the live blogs that report events as they unfold, often with
brutal honesty about what we don't know or hope to find out.
With
this in mind, the newsdesk at the Guardian is planning an experiment in
opening its doors. The idea is to publish a carefully-selected portion
of the national, international and business newslists on this daily blog and encourage people to get in touch with reporters and editors via Twitter if they have ideas.
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