Story Ideas: Soliciting Your Feedback

One part of my role at Technology Review, maybe the most important and certainly the most time consuming, requires me to sift through daily news releases, read pitches from my writers, and scan news across from a variety of sources. In the next week, I have two capable and aspiring journalists (and former students of mine) who will be, for all intents and purposes, my personal news aggregators, helping me parse through the 24-hour news cycle.

At the end of the day, though, the story decisions for our site rest largely on my shoulders – which is a nice, but somewhat antiquated way to look at the news. Editors and reporters, are, and I believe, will continue to be important. But the Internet and the Web have given editors the ability to reach out to the community, and get feedback from a wide variety of places.

Some journalists aren’t entirely happy about that wall breaking down. I, for one, am excited. From time to time, I will be posting ideas that may soon be stories on TechnologyReview.com, to get feedback from you on what you think is important. Eventually, this process will be far more open that it will be initially (and, we hope, will include Wikis and open blogs) – but for now, we’ll start with this simple tool.

I have 6 story pitches in front of me. Which of these sounds interesting to you (and feel free to add your own ideas here):

1) Atheros’ WLAN chip for cell phones
2) xMax alternative to wireless FireWire
3) Inside AMD’s Geode
4) video services on cell phones
5) breakthrough in ethanol from corn production
6) Gates Foundation “Grand Challenge”