Last year I worked with Clive Thompson on a great piece he did for
Wired about "Radical Transparency." In defiance of conventional journalistic practice, he blogged openly about the story as he reported it, and we incorporated input from his blog readers
in the final piece, tagging their contributions so readers could see who
contributed what. It was an early experiment in magazine transparency that's currently being carried many steps further by my
colleagues Jason Tanz and Nancy Miller, who are currently producing an entire feature in
full view of readers, posting their editorial meetings, raw notes, emails, rough drafts, and more on our website.
But this month, I was involved with another kind of experiment, one that indulged in radical magazine opacity. I worked with Steven Levy on his piece about Chrome, Google's new browser, and we couldn't even tell most of our own staff about it. Steven was given exclusive advance access to Google's top-secret project under the condition that we tell no one -- including many of our own people -- and release the story (online and in print) only after Google publicly announced it. The cloak-and-dagger stuff seemed worth it, since we were able to offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the project came. Though it did get a bit silly at times: I ended up calling our copy chief Agent 99, and she called me Max. There's a more detailed account of the process here.
