ARTS & FARCES internet

Wired editor Chris Anderson has publicly released a first draft of where he thinks publishing is headed. Although specific to the monthly magazine form, Anderson’s principles can be applied to any publishing format—magazines, books, websites—you name it, the ideas are worthy of any editor’s consideration. Anderson’s key concepts are expressed as six tactics:

1. Show who we are;
2. Show what we’re working on;
3. Process as content;
4. Privilege the crowd;
5. Let readers decide what’s best
6. Wikifiy everything

Radical indeed. But Anderson hedges his bets—intelligently, one presumes—by admitting the seriousness of the consequences of his being wrong. His strategy is to advocate taking little steps. Small failures won’t bring everything crashing about his ears, and small successes can be scaled quickly across Wired‘s media properties.

In a follow-up to initial criticism, Anderson acknowledges that the kind of open source journalism he’s advocating will only work in “big” thesis-driven stories. Most of what Wired publishes is either too short or too voice-driven to work with this methodology.

It’s going to be interesting to watch as Wired begins its experiments with this open source approach to publishing. It’s going to be more interesting to see who in the publishing community is intelligent and ballsy enough to start trying to swim with this particular current, rather than against it.