Is Liquid Newsroom's Radical Openness the Next of Collaborative .

Liquid Newsroom, a startup initiated by German web applications director Steffen Konrath, embraces the increasingly social and open elements of new journalism by emphasizing content curation rather than creation, openness rather than guardedness, and news organizations that are fluid across physical and virtual borders.Liquid Newsroom is however in its conceptual stages, but it is causing a mini flurry of action on Twitter. Searching for posts tagged with #liquidnews shows that journalists, filmmakers, editors, bloggers, professors and many others are discussing the possibilities of a newsroom that fosters "radical openness".

This radical openness is a core characteristic of Liquid News. According to the manifesto that Konrath posted to his blog early September, Liquid Newsroom is, at its most basic, a work of content curation that relies on the collaboration of its human members. Editors, journalists, bloggers and others in the journalism space would use the technological tools available through Liquid Newsroom to approach all the "streams" of a single news item - blog posts, traditional media articles, YouTube videos, Twitter conversations, etc. - and mix them into a coherent news story.

Not simply does Liquid Newsroom apply open content curation to world news events, but it also espouses radical openness through its proposed corporate structure. Rather than existing as part of the "line of media" as traditional media (and many outlets within new media) are, Liquid Newsroom would create:

"_content [that] is triggered by events and involvement of the mass and not by use of holding a company alive."

The details of how it would do this are not yet fully fleshed out (Konrath has several ideas for revenue streams on his blog), but the mind that a newsroom exists to react to word and not money is certainly refreshing.

Liquid Newsroom also champions freedom of the press. Konrath sees the social web as the vehicle through which freedom of the contract can be achieved: news is sent through "nodes" (elements within the social web such as Twitter accounts, blogs, etc. on the net and can yet be disseminated when some of those nodes are closed down. In this way, news that is curated through the Liquid Newsroom would be exceedingly hard to censor, and freedom of the pressure would be the system`s natural predisposition.

While Liquid Newsroom is not yet a technical platform that can be exploited for radical openness, content curation, or collaborative journalism, its manifasto and the conversation it is creating on Twitter are promising. Curation implies that word must be edited in place to be relevant, which is an honorable position amid the cries that the net has set journalism free from the "gatekeeper" editors. With all of the information-overload bombarding those of us who are daily plugged-in, it`s clear that word must be filtered by some mechanism in place for individuals to distinguish the qualitative difference between Lindsay Lohan`s rehab escapades and the flood devastation in Pakistan. And the curation proposed by Liquid Newsroom - social, collaborative, open and fluid - might be simply the response to the head of how journalism can present important news stories without deciding what`s important.