[NetBehaviour] LA Times 'wikitorial' gives editors red faces

[marc]

*LA Times 'wikitorial' gives editors red faces*

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Wednesday June 22, 2005
The Guardian

It was the boldest of innovations. A chance for the mainstream media to 
strike back against the upstarts of the online world. On Friday the Los 
Angeles Times - an unwieldy broadsheet newspaper - launched its 
"wikitorial", an interactive device allowing readers to contribute to 
and rewrite its editorial column.

"Do you see fatuous reasoning, a selective reading of the facts, a lack 
of poetry?" asked an introductory article in the paper. "Well, what are 
you going to do about it? You could send us an e-mail ... But today you 
have a new option: Rewrite the editorial yourself."

 Trumpeting the experiment as "a constantly evolving collaboration among 
readers in a communal search for truth", the paper admitted that it 
faced potential disaster: "Like an arthritic old lady who takes to the 
dance floor ... the Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than 
to be hip. We acknowledge that possibility."

At the end of a 1,000-word editorial about the war in Iraq, online 
readers were invited to "Click here to Wiki this morning's editorial".

But by Sunday, readers were met with the following statement: "Where is 
the wikitorial? Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at 
least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with 
inappropriate material."

Hot and flustered, the arthritic old lady had left the dance floor.

The wikitorial took its lead from the website wikipedia.org, an 
encyclopaedia on the internet written by volunteers. The name comes from 
the Hawaiian term "wiki wiki", meaning quick or informal.

The wikitorial started with the first users posting modest amendments to 
the editorial just hours after its publication.

more...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1511745,00.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20050623/843787da/attachment.htm>