2 Responses

1. Kevin Anderson

   April 18th, 2006 at 3:53 pm

   1

   For me, transparency is about being open and honest about my values and process as a journalist. As Jay Rosen at PressThink once said to me, we journalists call on all kinds of institutions to be transparent: Government, corporations, NGOs, but we’re pretty poor when it comes to our own work. I think blogs and other collaborative tools recognise a new relationship with our audience, one in which our audience expects a right of reply. In my own work, a little recognition of this fact and a little engagement with my audience goes a long way.

2. Andy

   April 18th, 2006 at 9:54 pm

   2

   I agree. I think there is a real discussion to be had about what transparency means long term, especially with respect to the relationship we have with our audience. In a lot of ways collaborative tools are going a long way to change and even end the relationship as we know it.

   The journalistic relationship has never really been about collaboration at the point of delivery. In some cases collaboration never really stretches past the point of a punter tipping off a journo to a story.

   One of the reasons we put pressure on institutions to be transparent is that one of our duties as journalists is to question; to ask should they be the keepers of this stuff in the first place. That’s a question that we may find asked of us in the demands for transparency.