When I get some free time, I’m planning on writing an article about a particular aspect of the cinema industry. It’s nothing special–it won’t be long or riveting or feature any celebrities. It’s just a tiny subject I’ve been wondering about for a while, and figured I could write an article to explore it. I might pitch the article to a local newspaper or regional magazine, but I wouldn’t really be doing it for the money.
To my point. As Dan Gilmor is fond of saying, as a journalist, your readers know more than you do. He (and others, like Tod Maffin) have ‘open sourced’ their articles in progress, posting them to a wiki and encouraging others to contribute, edit, delete and otherwise improve the article.
I’m thinking of doing this. I suppose I could do it here on my weblog, but I was wondering if anybody knows of a formalized community for this? A kind of news improvement wiki? I imagine, though, it would probably just get flooded by college sophomores with half-written essays. Any suggestions?
UBC did something similar to develop their career planning service programs and courses and it was quite successful.
I would be interested in seeing how your article turns out if you use this method.
The closest I know of is WikiNews, which has a heavy emphasis on current events but does have some cultural entries (for example, see http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Movies ).