Host: Newspapers have been known to go to great lengths to hide their story budgets—that’s the all-important list of what’s coming up in the next day’s paper. One British paper, however, has begun to do the opposite in the last few months. They’re making their lists public so readers can 1)weigh in on story decisions. Dan Roberts is the national news editor for the Guardian. He joins us from the offices of the paper in London. Dan, welcome.
　　Dan: Hi.
　　Host: So, what on earth possessed you to publish your story list?
　　Dan: We’ve been experimenting for a while in trying to get readers to help us report things. And we realized that the only way to really take that to a bigger scale was to tell them what we’re already doing, ’cause there’s no point in just kind of giving them a blank of sheet and saying, what would you do? You have to kind of engage them in the process as we go along. We got a lot of good feedback, so we decided to keep it going. And I think we are actually giving people stories that we haven’t written about when we think they can help. So, a good example: we did an investigation into the 2)exploitation of interns. And rather than the normal process of doing the investigation and then opening the piece up for comments on the website and then seeing people’s experiences, we flipped it. And we said right in advance we were going to tell people,“We want to investigate this, can you give us examples of perhaps how you’ve been exploited as an unpaid intern?” And suggestions poured in. And then we did the report and we checked them out. The advantage of that was that you get a much better story. We…we had some brilliant examples that really opened people’s minds to just how bad the problem was. But also we had an audience that were already there waiting for us to tell them about it. So, it ended up being the best-read story of the week.
　　Host: So, talk more about how this experiment affected the way you made decisions about what to cover.
　　Dan: We are finding sometimes the editors have a particular sort of 3)shortsightedness about an issue that the readers are…are much more fired up about. We had a good example: we were covering reforms to the National Health Service. We’d reported it extensively over the summer but when the bill actually reached Parliament we kind of switched off from it. And we got a lot of feedback from readers saying, no, we really want every spit and cough of the parliamentary debate. And so we responded to that. We set up live coverage for the two-day debate and put some reporting resource into it. And they were right. The parliamentary stage was much more important than we had acknowledged. And we got huge traffic on the stories but also a lot of engagement in the comment threads under the stories. Host: What did this experiment teach you about your news judgment?
　　Dan: Well, I think we’ve got to recognize our strengths and weaknesses. I mean, I think our strengths are that as professional journalists we can be dispassionate about things. And the positive side of it is that there’s only a few of us. And there’s a big world and there’s an awful lot of things going on. And actually, it’s that wisdom-ofcrowds thing, that actually good ideas bubble up, that you’re not going to get through a dozen people sitting in a room around a table 4)chewing over that day’s news.
　　Host: Thank you so much.
　　Dan: Thank you.
　　物竞天择，适者生存。自然界的这条规律，同样也适用于新闻界。在网络新闻风起云涌的时代，这个规律似乎再合适不过了。如何生存，这是摆在所有传统媒体，特别是纸质媒体面前的难题。在诸报自危的时候，英国的一份大报勇敢地走出了第一步。
　　


　　主持人：众所皆知，报社会竭尽全力去隐藏他们的报道计划——那些都是将要出现在明天报纸上的至关重要的报道。然而，英国的一家报社在这几个月来却反其道而行之，他们公开他们的报道计划，让读者们能够参与报道的决策。丹·罗伯茨是《卫报》的国内新闻编辑，他在伦敦的报社办公室参与我们的节目。丹，欢迎你。
　　丹：你好。
　　主持人：到底是什么原因促使你们公开你们的报道计划？
　　丹：我们尝试请读者帮助我们报道事件已经有一段时间了。我们意识到，要使报道上一个台阶，唯一的办法就是告诉读者我们在做什么，因为什么都不跟他们说，只让他们回答“你会怎么做？”的问题毫无意义。你必须吸引他们参与到我们的报道进程中。我们得到了很多积极的反馈，所以我们决定继续做下去。其实，我们是将那些还未采写而又觉得读者可以提供帮助的事件告诉他们。有一个成功的例子是：我们做过一个剥削实习生的调查。我们没有按常规出牌：先做调查，把完成的报道放到在网站上让人评论，然后观察人们的经历。相反，我们事先告诉大家：“我们准备调查这个内容，你们能否提供一些身为无薪实习生如何被利用的事例？”于是，建议大量涌入，我们做了事件的报道，并且进行了核实。这样做的好处是你能把报道写得更好。我们有过一些很精彩的例子，切实地让人们开了眼界，知道了问题有多严重。而同时，也有读者等着我们将事情告诉他们。结果这成了那一周最受欢迎的报道。
　　主持人：请再讲一下这一次经历对你们如何决定报道内容有何影响。
　　丹：我们发现，有时编辑们会对某件事特别地短视，而读者对此却兴趣更高。我们有一个好例子：我们报道了有关国民医疗保健制度的改革。我报在整个夏天广泛全面地报道了这件事，但当这个提案送到议会后，我们基本上就停止了报道。然后我们收到很多反馈，读者说：别停下，我们非常想知道议会辩论的每一个细节。于是我们对此作出了回应，对议会两天的辩论作了现场报道，并介绍了一些与事件相关的资料来源。读者是对的，议会辩论阶段远比我们此前意识到的重要得多。在我们网站关注这一系列报道的人非常多，而且他们留下了非常多的评论。
　　主持人：这个经历对你们在新闻的判断方面有什么启发？
　　丹：哦，我觉得我们要认识到自身的长处及不足。我认为我们的长处是，作为专业新闻工作者我们能够做到不带感情色彩地报道事件。而通过读者参与的做法带来的积极意义是，我们只是少数人，而大千世界，事情海量涌现。事实上，正是有了群众的智慧，好主意才能不断冒出。这是一班人在房间围着桌子坐在一起琢磨当天的新闻所不能做到的。
　　主持人：非常感谢。
　　丹：谢谢。