CorpComms Magazine

For organisations that preach openness and transparency, newspapers can be secretive places. Britain's ultra-competitive newsrooms tend to guard their stories jealously and rarely disclose what they are working on until the moment of publication. Even then, many journalists have been lukewarm about entering into public debate - wary of legal challenge or wasted hours with the 'green ink brigade'.

Times are changing fast though. Open comment threads at the end of online articles mean that most reporters now expect their stories to be picked over and discussed by readers - often in a painfully public way. A chillier climate of regulation following the News of the World phone hacking scandal is forcing greater accountability and openness whether journalists like it or not. Readers' editors and regular corrections and clarifications columns, for example, are at last becoming more common on Fleet Street.

But what if dealing with readers wasn't seen as a chore, but an asset: a way of tapping into a wider range of ideas and gauging what people might be interested in before committing scarce reporting time? This was the theory, at least, behind The Guardian's recent attempt to open up its news process in advance of publication - revealing our live news list of upcoming stories and inviting comment and suggestions.

The idea of open-sourcing the newsroom might seem a pretty woolly one: right up there with previous short-lived citizen journalism crazes. But we know it works in principle because some of The Guardian's biggest stories arrive this way now. From obtaining evidence of how Ian Tomlinson died during the G20 protests in 2009, through to covering England's riots this summer, we often find our readers are our best sources of information. The only question was whether we could make this a more routine part of our news reporting process, rather than waiting for a riot to start before asking people what was going on - hence our experiment to publish the daily lists drawn up  by news editors on the national, international, business and sport desks.

So far, the experience has been encouraging. Despite a deliberately low-key launch, the news lists were read more than 30,000 times in the first fortnight, attracting hundreds of positive comments on Twitter and elsewhere. At first, most people were more interested in the concept than the content, but story ideas and tips began to flow too - ranging from things we were missing on the NHS reforms and library closures, to requests that we find out more about missing anti-aircraft missiles in Libya. The Twitter hashtag #opennews has also been successfully used to track sentiment on editorial issues such as how prominently we should display pictures of Gadaffi's corpse.

After the initial experiment, we now hope to refine the way we display the news lists to make it easier to follow which stories are still being worked on and find out what happened to the ones that have been published. Whether it becomes a revolution in the way we work, or just a useful additional way of communicating with our readers remains to be seen, but it seems to have done little harm and it's hard to imagine us wanting to go back to keeping our news-gathering process hidden away.

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