Dan Gillmor has a great piece on Mediactive, his new site dedicated to exploring how to democratize the media. Called, Eleven Things I’d do if I Ran a News Organization, he outlines how news organizations can embrace transparency, communication and interaction to improve their coverage and value to their readers/viewers.

Two personal favs:

• “Every print article would have an accompanying box called “Things We Don’t Know” — a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting.” He goes on to suggest that readers and viewers should be invited onto the news organization Web site to help fill in the blanks.
• “We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence.” This one should be self-explanatory but in an age he said, she said journalism, a BS monitor would be a welcome change.

The entire post can be found here. And I think its value goes beyond “journalism” and includes best practices for any organization (read: NGO, non-profit, etc.) that aims to demonstrate and report what’s of interest to their communities.

Gillmor is the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication,