Lewis Wallace: Wired Editor – A Directive From the Top For Radical Transparency

Lewis Wallace is the editor for Eliot, our Wired beat blogger. At the same, however, Eliot has full control of his blog. This flexiblity means he might be one of the few beat bloggers that tries to build the social network around his blog, not on a third party site.

I had a brief chat with Lewis about the beat blogging project and it seems the inspiration for joining this project is the news organizations goal to find more ways to be radically transparent.

Below is an edited version of the conversation with Lewis.

So what is your role in relationship to the blog?

Eliot has free reign, he manages his own blog and does the reporting on
the beat that he covers. I talk to him fairly frequently on the phone
and a lot in emails, but that’s it with him being in NY. The way that
blogs work here in general, people run them and post to them. I may ask
them to expand or cover a specific thing, but in general Eliot picks
what he write s about in a day to day basis.

What is the reality in terms of technical support?
It depends on the specifics of the request. We will put resources
behind what is important to us and we try to give people what they need
to get the job done, but things do take resources and they don’t
necessarily turn on a dime.

But we are obviously not afraid of new technology. If Eliot wants to
put a Twitter feed, nobody would complain or make him jump through
hoops explaining why. He can do whatever he wants.

So what’s next in terms of beat blogging?

Well, we are definitely encouraged to try things and we want to. It’s a
matter of us figuring out exactly what strategy we want to use. It
might be just building his own special little private social network.
If we could do it on his blog, that makes the most sense.

We really want to push being very transparent. When Alexis Madrigal started his experiment Evan Hansen (the editor in chief) sent out an email lauding that move. So the organization is behind it straight from the top.