Dan “Walk the Walk” Gillmor is working on a book about his concept of “we media” and he’s inviting us to participate:

The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is “Making the News” — reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today’s (and tomorrow’s) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person’s grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.

I’m doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let’s practice what I preach.

To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline…

From the outline, it sounds like the book is going to be the definitive stake in the ground for the new new journalism. And the very process Dan is initiating — open the outline, continue the online conversation after the book is published — points to one of the most important changes the Web has brought to publishing: publishing is not longer a discrete moment of done-ness when the private is made public. We Media is continuous media.

(FWIW, I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined entirely on-line. Writing on line was a great experience, but I got the increment wrong: Do not post drafts every day, especially when you know that what you just wrote is crap that you’re going to un-write the next day.)

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