Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Guardian is opening up its newslists so you can help us make news

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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