Jtm-pnw-session-journ-wiki

How is journalism different when the tool is a wiki?

We're meeting in area H, which is right by the food table.

The organizer, Michael Andersen (that's me) is a wiki amateur building a startup around ideas like Matt Thompson's about the importance and potential of contextually rich reporting online. It's going to be a resource for people who live in Portland without a car.

Though I want to make it possible for other people to contribute, I intend to be my site's main contributor. And that might be a secret about news wikis: the anyone-can-edit feature is potentially less important than approaching the news from a "resource page" perspective.

We've seen this "resource page" idea pop up lately in the Google/NYT/WaPo "Living Stories" project. Cannily, Thompson has also identified this as the idea behind "The Giant Pool of Money," the celebrated This American Life piece that grew into NPR's Planet Money.

If you know wikis, let's talk about their best practices -- technologically and socially. If you know journalism, let's talk about creating a workflow that inserts relevant new content into an evergreen resource page. What sorts of information should go in an inverted pyramid ... but not in a news wiki?