It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.
Read the full piece at mashable.com
Rule #2 or #3 they taught back in journalism school was to beware of superlatives such as characterizing something as the first or the biggest or the oldest because more often than not, it isn’t. Google Wave is not the first real-time collaborative writing tool. I’ll allow that times have changed since ON Technology introduced Instant Update back in the early 1990s. So perhaps Wave will catch on where Instant Update never did. But I personally doubt if it will go much beyond the predictable handful of early adopters. And as far as Wave being the next wave in newshandling, it’s unlikely. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.
I first tried introducing Instant Update to newspaper newsrooms while I was working for Gannett’s Advanced Systems Lab. I was assembling a suite of tools that might help us editors and journalists work more efficiently and take more advantage of technological improvements. We called the system NewsWorks.
Instant Update seemed like a natural part of NewsWorks, a way for editors to see what reporters were writing as they were writing it. No more yelling across the room, “Close it for a minute so I can see your lede!” No more elbowing between two reporters trying to write a breaking news story together on deadline.
It didn’t happen. Journalists at the Poughkeepsie Journal where I first installed NewsWorks didn’t like Instant Update any more than they liked the editor simply standing behind them reading their screen as they wrote. At least during seriously creative moments. It was fine for small stuff and not terribly important stuff. But when a professional writer is trying to find just the right words under pressure, any experienced news manager knows it takes delicate kibitzing not to actually slow down the process and damage the quality of the final piece.
And that was just with professional journalists. Back then, no one was talking about bringing the general public into the process. We were just starting to invite select community members into our news meetings.
Now, as I said, perhaps people have changed since those pre-Internet days. Wikis are a solidly and widely implemented technology that successfully produces a lot of collaborative writing. But it seems to me that projects such as Wikipedia work well because they have taken the time element out of the equation. You can collaborate with others on an entry over a long period, whenever you are moved to that level of interest and involvement.
As this article from Mashable.com makes clear, what makes Google Wave different than just any other wiki implementation is precisely that it adds in the time element — the idea that you are working on a Wave pretty much at the same time other collaborators are there. As one of the quotes put it, “It’s a lot more live than Twitter because it’s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other.”
Time is the most scarce of commodities. It is why readership and viewership are dropping like rocks. They don’t have time for us. Most of the other advances we’re making in creating non-traditional media environments for our audiences are about letting them participate on their own schedules. So why would anyone think that, just because of Wave, people are going to start scheduling their collaborations with us around our news cycles?
So is Google Wave a community-building tool? Sure. An off-cycle news collaboration environment? Perhaps. Changing the way news is done? Don’t expect much.
