After LATimes.com's awful experience with its "
wikitorial" experiment, will the newspaper and its website ever venture into
wiki territory again? (Some people inserted profanity and pornographic content into the editorial.) Perhaps, said
Michael Newman,
deputy editor of the editorial pages, in a panel appearance at the
National Conference of Editorial Writers
conference in Portland,
Oregon, on Saturday.
But Newman and his colleagues have learned their lesson. The fully open
wiki format that the website tried to apply to a newspaper editorial
isn't likely to be used again. Rather, a more closed form of wiki might
be experimented with -- say, giving a select group of people access to
an opinion wiki page. (That's the approach I recommended in my
presentation at this conference.) Newman acknowledged that some wiki
purists might not view a wiki that's not fully open as a wiki.
The
Los Angeles Times
had been gaining a reputation as pushing the boundaries of newspaper
editorial pages (and respective website areas) under the leadership of
Michael Kinsley, former editor of
Slate. But even though Kinsley
resigned recently, Newman says his department will continue to be innovative.
