Beta was a concept thought up by IBM in the 1960s. It has been used by technology innovators ever since to make new products smarter, more-reliable and more user-friendly. Until now, it has never been applied to journalism.

We plan to use the concept of beta to help make written news stories more interactive, accurate and credible with the help of the best beta testers around – readers.

The concept is simple:
1. A journalist writes a story and posts it online in "beta" form.
2. The public can then log in to suggest extra sources, point out typos, critique for bias and upload media.
3. The journalist or editor makes or approves changes, verifies facts and posts a final draft sometime later (maybe hours or days). The names of the people who helped in the process are included at the bottom of the story as named contributors, giving them ownership of the piece.

Beta Journalism (working title) will be an open-source application to make this all possible. The idea relies heavily on the concept of crowdsourcing. It embraces the knowledge of the community, and it tells readers: This is a work in progress – please help us improve it.

But the application also recognizes the talent and hard work of the journalists who created the story in the first place. It does not hand the story completely over to the masses. It leaves the final product in the hands of the news organization – much like a software company would maintain the final call on changes to its own product after beta testing.

The Beta Journalism app will be tested (in beta form) in partnership with a news organization in Phoenix. This may be an existing news organization or one currently in the planning stages. Additionally, the team will also work with journalism educators in the Phoenix area to find out whether the app could help them teach students about fact-checking and ethics in a hands-on way.

Most news organizations are already centered in a geographic area and have a built-in core of community members who are knowledgeable and interested in the news. This application, which could be installed onto an already-existing news site or as the main feature of a standalone site, would help break down the barrier between journalist and reader.

Even today, readers are barred from participating in the creation of most news stories at mainstream news organizations. They can comment on the finished product, write a letter to the editor or link to it from their blog or social network. But they cannot do anything to help make that finished product better. The wall between a story and the reader‘s ideas is nearly impenetrable.

Beta Journalism breaks down that wall, encouraging readers to help a news organization improve its stories. The goal is to bring readers into the process, giving them ownership and building trust and loyalty along the way. To our knowledge, no other system exists anywhere else to allow this kind of community involvement.

Nick Martin is a veteran journalist who written for newspapers, magazines and websites alike. He currently runs HeatCity.org, an experiment in crowd-funded journalism in the Phoenix area. Martin has worked in the Valley of the Sun for several years, and has a deep knowledge of the complexities of civic life and society here. A former staff reporter at the East Valley Tribune in suburban Mesa, Ariz., his work has also appeared in Phoenix magazine, the Seattle Times, Denver Post, New York Post, and USA Today.

Chris Chandler, before co-founding the firm Flatterline (www.flatterline.com), dabbled in cross-layer wireless network routing algorithms as a PhD student at Arizona State University and co-authored several papers during his time there. His development experience includes several widely-integrated and PCI-compliant e-commerce platforms, a handful of data protection/encryption suites, and a significant amount of work for one of the world’s largest public-facing Certificate Authorities in addition to several other projects.

Curtis Miller, also a co-founder of Flatterline, has an MS in Computer Science and has been developing software for 9 years. He’s worked with large, distributed systems for the US Navy, behavioral health EHR systems and large-scale CMS. He found his true passion developing web applications using the Ruby programming language and hasn’t looked back since.