In this guest post, my friend Jason Tanz, senior editor at Wired, explains the reasons behind the magazine’s experiment in journalistic “radical transparency” around an article on Charlie Kaufman:

Every journalist has probably had that feeling – you’ve got a pile of material, a recorder full of interviews, you’ve been studying and speaking with subjects who have been gracious enough to let you into their lives – and now you have to turn the whole thing into a story.

You have to make sense of the thing, and you have to present it with the “Voice of Objective Authority”.  And that’s when you think, Who do I think I am? I’m not the Voice of Objective Authority. I’m just a dude. A dude who has researched a ton, and done the homework, but still. A dude.

I don’t know, maybe nobody else has that feeling, but I have it a lot. And I had it again when I interviewed Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Adaptation and Being John Malkovich.

We were talking about his previous dealings with the press, and he said (I’m paraphrasing here): You know, they never write about how nervous they are to meet me, or how their hands shook when they pressed ‘record,’ or anything like that. They write as this really sophisticated persona, they paint themselves as these all-knowing characters, instead of fallible, nervous people.

Journalists are not held in high regard these days, and there are a whole raft of reasons why, but I’d argue that one reason is that we too often hide behind our objective voice. We present ourselves as all-knowing seers, delivering the truth from the mountaintop, when really our product—like any—is the product of humans making decisions.

That’s not something we should hide from – we should embrace it. In my time, I’ve received plenty of angry letters from readers. Some of them raise substantive points, others are inane rants.

But almost 100% of the time, I find even the angriest critic can be won over by a simple response, explaining what I was thinking and why I made the choices I did. When people see us as thoughtful people making tough choices—rather than the giant faceless “MSM”—they soften almost instantly.

At Wired, we’ve written about the notion of “radical transparency,” in which companies air their inner deliberations online and thereby create stronger relationships with their customers. When it came time to write my Kaufman profile, I suggested something similar: Let’s post everything that went into the pitching, writing, editing, and design of this story.

To my astonishment, my co-workers and bosses went for it enthusiastically. So far, on our Storyboard blog, we’ve posted the initial pitch, e-mails between me and my editor, our appeals to Kaufman, audio of our full 3-hour interview, and even my rough draft, my editor’s edit, and (soon) the top edit.

In the future we’ll post design ideas and page proofs, all the way through to the final version. It has been terrifying, but also invigorating. We have no reason to be ashamed of anything we’re doing, and now the rest of the world has the opportunity to see that for themselves.

When we started this, the question we most often received (and asked) was – Will anybody care? We had real doubts about this. It is, let’s be honest, a solipsistic exercise.

But we’ve been at it for a couple weeks now, and the response has been tremendous and overwhelmingly positive. I’ve received downright emotional e-mails from complete strangers who say (and this is a direct quote), “It makes me feel ‘wired’ – which may be one of the dorkiest things I’ve ever said, but still true.”

Some bloggers have gone so far as to call this “a sign of things to come.”

I don’t know about that. This is a specific approach to this specific story; it’s a one-time experiment, and I can’t imagine there would be appetite for much more than that.”

The underlying questions that we’re trying to address—how do we connect to readers and engage them in our process and our product—are ones we’re sure to keep asking.

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