At McClatchy, a wiki

I am a regular reader of Etaoin Shrdlu, the blog of Howard Weaver, VP News at the McClatchy Company. Weaver brings to the blog (explanation of name here) a mix of passion, reason, hope, quirkiness and candor that I am not used to seeing in public from corporate news folks.

Here is a taste of one recent post about the urgency of industry transformation:

“My current metaphor for our business is this: We have to move, and we can see a secure spot for ourselves right across the river. The good news is, there’s a bridge; the bad news is, it’s on fire. There’s time to get across, but not to [screw] around. I intend to get to the other side before the bridge burns up. Who’s coming with me?”

Here is a post in which he honored the anger of the newsroom over his stay at a pricey Raleigh hotel amidst newsroom cutbacks. And there are many others that highlight new technology and good work in McClatchy newsrooms, like this one about a reporter who used Twitter to cover a criminal trial at The Wichita Eagle.

This week, Weaver launched a new experiment, a wiki called McClatchyNext, “intended as a way to collect ideas, argue about them and save information and reference points in ways we can all easily share and retrieve. If it works, it will be a more coherent version of the comments I very much appreciate at my blog—better organized, easier to follow, more accessible.”

I applaud this experiment on three counts:
1. Better communication between newsrooms. In the frenzy of change, newsrooms seem too often to be re-inventing the wheel, trying things that others already have learned will not succeed or have remolded into successes. Trial-and-error has value, but not en masse.
2. Using a relatively new (to many journalists anyway) tool, the wiki. The more journalists can learn about how people increasingly use wikis and social networks to share news and information, the better.
3. McClatchyNext is public and you don’t have to belong to a McClatchy organization to join. Instructions are in the introduction.

I also like the working folders Weaver has already set up to get the wiki started: Philosophia, Ideas that did not work, Ideas that might work, Ideas that worked, Mad as hell,

I’m signing up. I hope people participate. As Weaver notes: “Obviously, this can’t work without community participation. I promise it will get read and considered and introduced into conversations here in the corporate suite, and I hope it will likewise energize and incubate discussions at individual newsrooms and between newsrooms, too.”