The hot trend in publishing these days is "transparency" — letting readers watch the media sausage being made. Why leave the tedious back-and-forth between writers and editors unpublished, when so much cleverness goes into telling colleagues how they've done it all wrong? Wired is doing it now with a feature, still in the works, on screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. We don't think the editors of Time intended to follow Wired's footsteps, but they did. A Q&A with Dr. Sam Parnia, an expert on death, was published on Time.com and distributed on Yahoo News with editors' comments attached. It asks, "What Happens When We Die?" But it doesn't address the more important question: What happens when we merely wish we could?

The story that Google was going to buy videogame publisher Valve "any second now," floated by U.K. tech tabloid The Inquirer this morning, is a "complete fabrication," according to Valve executive Doug Lombardi, pictured here. Sorry, Inquirer — I certainly know how it feels when wronged by a "WELL PLACED SOURCE." Maybe demote them to lowercase next time you float their rumor? [MTV Multiplayer Blog]

Mother Jones, the lefty politics magazine based in San Francisco, tarnishes its usually sterling reputation for tough investigative reporting with an interview with Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit behind the Firefox Web browser. The deepest "inside the Firefox's den" they venture? Exposing the arresting effects of Baker's mane of red hair on the mostly male-dominated rooms she commands. If Mother Jones were up to its usual hijinks, it would be asking Baker, instead, about rumors that Mozilla faces a $14 million back tax bill after flunking its latest audit.Mozilla hasn't filed financials since its 2006 report, when it just squeaked by a rule that allowed it to avoid disbursing more of the money that has gushed into its coffers from a lucrative search-referral deal with Google. Since nonprofits like Mozilla are allowed to file their finances on a downright sluggish schedule, it will be some time before we know what's really happening with the browser maker. But it has been holding onto a large chunk of change just in case it faced a challenge over its nonprofit status, and we've heard that the latest review of Mozilla's finances didn't hold good news. Wouldn't that have made for a much interesting conversation than whether Baker considers herself a geek sex symbol? (Photo via Mother Jones)

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday:

So much for radical transparency. Microsoft's embrace of honest online criticism stopped at VentureBeat blogger Dean Takahashi's insanely long story about how the software giant launched its Xbox 360 game console despite production flaws. The story had one source brave enough to go on the record: Robert Delaware, a contract game tester, who talked about a bug he encountered during testing phases persisting as the Xbox went into production. Now he's out of a job and faces a civil suit from Microsoft for violating a nondisclosure agreement.“I don’t regret it,” he told VentureBeat in a phone call on Thursday. “I’ll fight it. If they want to come after me, bring it on." "This kind of witch-hunt mentality is wrongheaded," writes Takahashi. "When I was thinking about making a difference with our story this isn’t what I had in mind." We're just amazed that Microsoft's legal team made it through all six pages of Takahashi's story.

The only people more tragic than Web 2.0 pundits who demand newspaper reporters overshare their every move are the reporters who take their advice. Berny Morson from Denver's Rocky Mountain News dragged the gravesite into the 21st century Wednesday by sending updates from the funeral of a three-year-old boy killed in a car crash that made headlines last week. I'm not saying Berny (is that M or F?) shouldn't have done it — I'm saying Berny did it wrong. Rather than convey the human drama on location, Morson dryly noted each step in a ritual that readers could have guessed. Next time, why not let the next of kin do the typing? That seems easier.

"Email becomes a dangerous distraction," headlines a guest column by an "expert in collaboration and communications" in the usually tech-savvy Sydney Morning Herald. If you check mail every five minutes, you lose eight hours a week of mental concentration, according to some glib algebra done on the results of a study. The cure for distracting email conversations? "Twitter ... instant messaging ... wikis ... blogs." You've guessed this already, but allow me to edit the author's bio for clarity: Suw Charman-Anderson is a freelance social software consultant.

Writer Jason Tanz continues with the overshare on his behind-the-scenes blog for a Wired profile of screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman, best known for Jim Carrey vehicle Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Today Tanz has uploaded a rough draft of his story. Forgive the typos and factual errors, he asks, in return for the peek at his process. We couldn't resist the urge to crowdsource his editor's response:

Shares of United plummeted 75 percent on the Nasdaq exchange today before trading was manually halted. All of this because of a chain of events that started when a link to an old story from 2002 on the air carrier's bankruptcy appeared as a link on the website of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was picked up by Google News, got written up by a newsletter produced by Income Securities Advisor, which in turn was distributed on the Bloomberg wire. Google is blaming the newspaper, while the newspaper is blaming Google. Bloomberg has washed its hands of the affair, blaming the content provider. And algorithm worshippers can all point to the puny human who didn't read the dateline. But that wasn't the real bug in the meatware.It really boiled down to a bunch of people believing something they read on the Internet. In other words, Google and Bloomberg are seen as trusted sources. Google sells itself as more trustworthy because there are no editorial decisions made by humans on the news site — when of course, like Bloomberg's syndication practices, it's just that much cheaper to maintain. What neither of them have solved is the entire problem with the mechanization of information distribution: Garbage in, garbage out.

"What if we showed how we produced this story?" iconoclastic Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked the team producing an article about self-referential screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (in photo) and his new self-referential film about a self-referential Broadway play, Synecdoche, New York. "What would happen if we broke the rules, we put the whole thing online as we produced it?" "What if we posted the edit — hell, the rough draft." "What if we posted the pitch letter?" "What if we posted the emails about the pitch letter?" Keep going guys .... What if we posted the email you sent Valleywag? Transparency just keeps getting easier.

The media frenzy earlier this week over Google's Chrome Web browser was so over the top that I wondered: How far did reporters go questing for commentary, for insight, for historical context? How many of them chased down Jamie Zawinski, the Netscape engineer turned beer-peddling South-of-Market nightclub owner, who played a critical role in making the Netscape browser open source — a move which, years later, made Google's browser possible? So I IM'd him: "What is the absolute worst media inquiry you've gotten about Google Chrome this week?""I have gotten none until now," he replied. "Which makes this one the worst by default."

Elizabeth Coe sent 100 friends a link to her company's website. This feat got her booted from Facebook — and got her featured in the opening of a Washington Post story about Facebook's spam-fighting effort. Facebook is now banning users who ask too many people to be friends all at once, send too many messages, join too many groups, or "poke" too many people. "All I was doing is using it to communicate more efficiently, which is what I thought it was for," Coe told the Post, which goes on to explore the ins and outs of Facebook's unpublished rules.This much is easy to understand: Sending 100 friends a link to your company's site is spam by any reasonable person's definition, whether you think it's "efficient" or not. Facebook has to crack down on such behavior because its users are getting sick of a surfeit of irrelevant messages, whether they're from friends or advertisers. Web security firm Cloudmark says 37 percent of Facebook users have noticed an uptick in spam over the past six months. What's more, Facebook is dealing with an increasing barrage of worms, viruses, phishing scams, as well as security threats for which researchers haven't invented suitably scary jargon yet.

Magazines aren't in the business of breaking news. But had Google PR not inadvertently leaked word of its Google Chrome Web browser, Steven Levy's feature in Wired's forthcoming October issue might have been both the first and last word on the project. It required the Faustian bargain typical of fly-on-the-wall features: Get deep inside the company, in exchange for letting the subject dictate the timing of the story. But this story was trickier than most, since Chrome was still a secret when the issue was under production. Normally, dozens of eyes would fall on the story. How did a magazine's labor-heavy business model intersect with Google's maniacal obsession with secrecy? This was, in some ways, the exact opposite of last year's cover story on "radical transparency." Bob Cohn, Wired's executive editor, explained to Valleywag how they pulled it off:

When there's no new story about Twitter and all of its users — this week anyway — what's left to say? Reporters, they Twitter just like us! Today's Washington Post rounds up journalists covering the Democratic National Convention with Twitter, like former Wonkette editor and Time.com blogger Ana Marie Cox and the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar. (Who found her new boyfriend through Twitter, whee!) We boiled down the whole thing into only what's fit to Twitter itself.

As the token Wired mag contributor in a room full of polymaths on Saturday, I had to endure a recounting of the goofs — sorry, I mean the errata — in Wired's article about "King of Sci-Fi" Neal Stephenson and his new book, Anathem. The article, by Hackers author Steven Levy, is actually a pretty good writeup of the shy but strong-minded Stephenson and his big-think projects with people like Nathan Myhrvold, Alvy Ray Smith and Danny Hillis. But if there's one place you don't want to make a typo, it's in front of a hundred thousand rabidly detail-obsessed Stephenson fans. They'll never shut up now. Rather than hear it again, I sat down with a friend of Stephenson's who helped with the book (it ships on September 9, but advance copies are floating around) and assembled this definitive list of counterfactuals in the article:

Radar magazine has discovered hipsters in the sex trade. But make no mistake: These aren't San Francisco's Web-powered indie sex entrepreneurs. These women may wear little black leggings and sport Tina Fey glasses, but like most New Yorkers, they're employees at heart. Unlike their San Francisco counterparts, they largely rely on madams who handle both scheduling and billing. Radar assigned writer Jessica Pilot to commit an entitled act of stunt journalism: While ostensibly on the magazine's dime, she would turn a trick herself, and write it up first-person. She went it at like a novelist-wannabe temp showing up for a stint as a file clerk.

The whining by journalists about China's Internet restrictions at the Olympics in Beijing rings hollow: It belies how interested they are in actually reporting anything that might run afoul of the China's Communist censors. How convenient to blame packet sniffers and blocked network ports, instead of actually wearing out shoe leather tracking down protesters. Oh, but how much easier to refresh Amnesty International's website from the air-conditioned comfort of the Olympic Village. Actually showing up at a protest will get you detained without a trial, as muckraking videoblogger Brian Conley and friends have discovered. It's hard to meet deadlines from jail, so best to stick to hard-hitting reports about cheerleaders. A bonus: People actually enjoy watching that stuff.News Corp. has long treated the government in China with a velvet touch, and NBC's parent General Electric, with its huge infrastructure arm, has billions of reasons not to risk their investment in the games with any actual balanced reporting from China. In fact, American corporations like Nike are figuring out that having a state willing to bully and muzzle the press can have its upside. But before you go spinning media conglomerate conspiracy theories — there's a secret memo from Rupert Murdoch himself telling editors to take it easy on China! — remember that it ultimately boils down to individuals making reporting decisions based simply on trying to keep their jobs. Conley is no stranger to courting the ire of local officials — he and colleague Jeff Rae, who has also been detained, once regaled me over dinner in New York with a story about almost ending up behind bars while covering unrest in Guatemala and southern Mexico a few years ago. And the Iraqi citizens reporting for his site Alive in Baghdad don't just court jail, but death. So Conley and Rae couldn't have possibly been too surprised when, while following fellow foreigners specifically to record their protests, they got caught up in the dragnet. His company, Small World News, runs on a shoestring budget, and frankly the interest generated by his detention provides the kind of publicity neither he nor Students for a Free Tibet could otherwise afford — but only outside of China. As an entrepreneur trying to build a business, the jail time may ultimately help Conley out. But will it actually change China's policies? As anyone at Google or Yahoo can tell you, complicity with China has proven much more profitable than principles.

In an articled headlined "Microsoft unveils fruits of online shake-up," the Financial Times set me up for something big, trumpeting Microsoft's "new development intended to boost the pace of innovation in its online services group as it tries to close the gap with Google." But then I read the rest of the article.Doing so, I learned that three years after Microsoft poached him from his role as head of research at Yahoo, a guy named Gary Flake and his 150-person Live Labs team have come up with a product called Photosynth, which stitches images together to create larger images. But as you can tell by the above image — results for a search on "Mission District, San Franciso"— its search function doesn't really work. Also, none of it works on a Mac. Disappointing. Not Microsoft's product, which is about what we'd expect from the software giant. No, I'm chastened by the FT. On New York's subway system, the pink paper it's printed on is supposed to signify that one looks down from high even on the guy holding the WSJ to your left. But being seen reading articles like this make one a laughingstock even to Murdoch's masses.

PC Magazine includes Muxtape in its latest listicle, the "Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites," even though the RIAA's already "discovered" it, triggering a shutdown. Poor Kyle Monson, the writer of the piece — those cushy, weeks-long magazine lead times from when a piece is submitted to when it's published do have their downsides.

Credit InfoWorld's Tom Yager this: He's open with his failings. Perhaps too open. In his latest column "In memory of iPhone 3G," a review of Apple's mobile device, Yager writes, "Well, this is embarrassing but I might as well blurt it out: The iPhone 3G that Apple loaned to me was stolen." But Yager needn't fear Apple. They'll certainly let him test future devices after the warm review he gave this one. Instead, its the rest of us — or those of us that drive — that should fear Yager's testing method: