Influx Insights Tag Feed: wired

wired's experiment with transparency

Influx Insights — 2008-09-04T22:41:00Z

A writer gets a cool opportunity to do a piece on legendary Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and turns it into a chance for Wired to go transparent; blog, film it and invite people in.

I guess the idea is to take a Kaufman-like approach to Kaufman.

Here's the pitch video- it's a little low tech and tough to watch..

While this is all very 2.0 and "on trend" it creates some interesting problems and issues.

1. Does any one care enough to spend valuable time going through this stuff?

2. Who might these people be? How can you give them what they want?

3. Is it really transparent- what are we missing/not seeing?

4. Notes and process also need to be compelling. It's not enough to just post or shoot you need to do more- real creative skills are required

5. Does the telling of the backstory take away from the main effort?

It's a brave attempt to do something new and original and the goal of taking the reader into the process is nice. The challenge is making all this stuff compelling enough to make people want to check it out.

Perhaps thinking it of two distinct parts is the problem; the research and the story or the process and the story.

Does it need to be "a whole"; something we just explore and navigate around with hyperlinks et al?

It's smart of Wired to try this and I think with more work they could be on to something interesting that could lead to a new type of more "game-like"media experience.

Clearly, not everyone wants to be taken on a ride down a "wormhole", but there will be a few who might appreciate the experience, if it was designed correctly.

Posted by Ed Cotton

adding new dimensions to storytelling

Influx Insights — 2007-12-17T23:47:48Z

Alexis Madrigal has written for Influx a few times and should pending favorable conditions be working in the Planning Department of a large San Francisco agency, sadly the ad world’s loss is Wired magazine’s gain.

Alexis writes about science and space for the renowned tech lifestyle pub, but he is also taking the concept of journalism into the 2.0 world.

If you are interested, you can follow Alexis’s research process on his Twitter account, you can see his inspiration sources from his Google reader account and join his Facebook group.

It’s interesting to see that content doesn’t have to be one-dimensional, it can be seen in many forms; pre creation, during creation all in addition to the finished piece.

There’s a lesson here for all media, all storytellers and planners; there’s gold in everything you do.

Posted by Ed Cotton

wired does a crowdsourcing experiment

Influx Insights — 2007-06-06T19:25:52Z

Assignment Zero is a great initiative from Wired magazine, it's open sourced journalism. The first big assignment was ironically, the topic of "crowdsourcing", Assignment Zero's own "crowd" interviewed Wikipedia super contributors, photo editors who buy micro-stock, the folks who created Bar Camp, Innocentive (Eli Lilly), Crowdspirit, the photo agency Scoopt, etc...

In all, the crowd conducted 80 interviews.

Crowdsourced journalism has been done around the world in various guises, but what makes Wired's effort stand out is the clear and well managed editorial process. The "crowd" were guided into the assignment, briefed and helped, rather than just left to go for it.

Like an effort to tap into users, it helps when the brief is good.

Think about how other publications can use "crowds" as "research army" to help journalists piece together elements for stories and as additional content that can be accessed by readers looking for the source material.