By design, journalism is often here today, gone tomorrow. It raises awareness, but leaves the scene for others to deepen the information connection.
Should it be a living, breathing, updated and refined form of content --- like a Wikipedia entry that aims to improve with time? Is there a new physics to journalism in the offing.
At the recent Associated Press Managing Editors' meeting, Google advisor Richard Gingras raised that as an option for journalism in the time ahead.
He believes journalism needs to find a new model and value proposition. Apart from a Wiki, he thinks news organizations can benefit from telling more people about who gathers information and how.

Anonymity is hardly the best way to commit journalism.
Too many anonymous sources crowd into basic reporting. Too many such sources take free swings at those they oppose. Too many journalism organizations permit such unattributed criticism because it makes for salty, lively and descriptive reportage.
It's interesting to see Google take a slightly different stand in its Wikipedia rival, Knol: Only identified authors need contribute. I had a closer look this weekend, and it has enormous potential to add to the digital sphere.
Now, I happen to love Wikipedia, but I also know it is susceptible to rogues in the wide community of scribes. For some it's a reasonable price to pay for the general good --- and speed and scope --- that comes with the wiki. I'm not so sure anonymity is necessary for something like a reference work. I stop short of citing Wikipedia, as do my colleagues, because they are concerned that recent posts have been massaged. It's far better to know the Knol writer.

Newspapers long ago found that readers liked a question-and-answer format on issues, and FAQs online have been with us from day one (particularly, it seems, for troubleshooting chapters in hardware and software manuals, instead of a live troubleshooter at the end of a phone line --- but I digress).
Now Hitwise is reporting a spectacular growth in another, broader iteration of this theme: the user-generated question-and-answer site. Peer-shared knowledge is a booming field, with U.S. visits up some 889 per cent over two years. When we can reach out to a community for answers, we do.
Yahoo! Answers has a strong market edge, with nearly three-quarters of the share, but watch out for WikiAnswers, which only launched last June and appears to be drafting off the Wikipedia brand quite successfully in the early going. It has commanded 18 per cent of the market in a matter of months.