In a guest post in September 2008, Jason Tanz, then a senior editor at Wired, explained why the magazine had opened up the making of his profile of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
The idea came from Kaufman. Talking about his previous dealings with the press, he observed that journalists never write about being nervous to meet him or about their hands shaking as they press record; they write as a sophisticated, all-knowing persona instead of as fallible people. Tanz took the criticism seriously, arguing that reporters too often hide behind an objective voice while their work is, like any other, the product of humans making decisions. His evidence was mundane and convincing: in his experience even the angriest reader letter could usually be answered by explaining what he had been thinking and why he had made the choices he made.
Wired had already written about radical transparency, the practice of companies airing internal deliberations in public, and applied it to the Kaufman story. On the magazine’s Storyboard blog it posted the original pitch, the emails between writer and editor, the appeals to Kaufman, audio of the full three-hour interview, the rough draft and the editor’s edit, with design ideas and page proofs to follow.
The response was strong and largely positive, which had not been guaranteed — the doubt going in was whether anyone would care about a solipsistic exercise. Tanz described it as a one-time experiment for one story rather than a template, while treating the question behind it as permanent.