Being able  add annotations to original source material and open them up to public view adds an entirely new dimension to reporting; and this is what New York Times has just done with version 2 of its document viewer.

Its this kind of innovation that will take journalism to the next level. Innovation that is vital in exploiting the dynamic technical edge of the Web.

The Times’ ‘Open’ blog says:

"Enabling reporters to highlight regions of the document they deem important helps readers to see how this material informed and shaped a story. For this reason we now have an “annotations” view dedicated to just the reporter’s notes on a story.

There have been some fantastic uses of annotations, like the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” These kinds of contributions give special insight into the original document in a way not easily communicated in a story."

The next step is to open up annotations to readers and thus make it a crowdsourcing tool, says the post.

The document viewer was developed because reporters found it difficult to present original source material using traiditional presentation tools "cumbersome, difficult to navigate, search or share" and provide "journalistic insight."

An embeddable and more flexible version of this tool is being developed and it will be released later as open-source. Fantastic!