Transparency in PR & Communications?

I hadn’t read Wired Magazine in quite some time, just felt like they had become a bit too fluffy and abstract in their coverage. I grabbed the latest issue after reading all the stuff about the WaggEd snaf-fu and devoured it, they certainly have me back as a reader. The whole issue revolves around the idea of transparency and the impact of social media. Combine that with my topic from yesterday about the image of communications and I started thinking about how we can use (or perhaps we already are) transparency to increase value-add and solve our industry image issue.

Two initial off the cuff thoughts for a Friday:

–Should agencies band together to make the information we have on journalists transparent to the writers themselves? Perhaps a wiki model that people can add, delete, edit, contest information on each other? Granted this involves complex issues including the ability to use Bacon’s content, but journalists know it is out there, as Vogelstein says: “…the existence of a document like this didn’t surprise me.”

–Yesterday Steve Hamm posted to his blog his need for information for a story, something that I believe we are going to see more and more. In the same breath is it not time for agencies and corporate PR practitioners to create “pitch feeds” where journalists could subscribe to receive information on topics of interest or even narrow it down to certain spokespeople, etc. Has anyone seen people doing this yet?

Would love to have people post comments to this blog or their own and continue this conversation. Will transparency alter the direction of communications tactics?

/kff