The Guardian’s Transparency Experiment

What’s the Latest Development?

To increase newsroom transparency, UK newspaper The Guardian is making its schedule of upcoming stories available to the public in a two-week experiment and inviting readers to contribute by contacting the reporters assigned to each story. Exclusives and embargoed content is kept private to protect both sources and the paper from competitors.

What’s the Big Idea?

Dan Roberts, national news editor at The Guardian, says the experiment—which is similar to one being run over at The Atlantic Wire—is a logical outgrowth of the paper’s move towards a more open news environment. Often readers will point out what’s wrong with a story after it has been published, or complain that an important news item failed to be covered too late after the fact, Roberts says. This will allow them to address these issues early on.