Open Source Journalism
Description
Tomas Rawlings:
"There's an immense amount of expertise out there on the Net, sites like Slashdot are pioneering new territory as they facilitate access to that knowledge, to the great and lasting benefit of us all. To describe this process Leonard coined a new term, 'Open-source journalism'. In his Salon article Leonard muses, "The main thing that has changed since 1999 has been the explosion of the blogosphere [the mass of blogs], which I like to view as one giant, nearly infinite, exercise in open-source journalism. There used to be a distinction between journalists and the people they interviewed, but now everyone is part of the conversation -- a New York Times journalist writes a story about economic affairs, and a hundred economists tear it apart online, and we all learn more from this than we would have in the past." As for the 'source' within the 'open-source' idea? "Access to the source material is not what I meant specifically, though I suppose it comes closer to the essence of the open-source software development methodology." (http://plugincinema.com/plugin/content/view/214/27/)
Example
Tomas Rawlings:
"Journalism is going open-source too. Back in October 1999, Jane's Intelligence Review ("the international journal of threat analysis") solicited feedback, for an article about Cyberterrorism it planned to publish, from the major geek website Slashdot ("news for nerds"). The army of vocal and knowledgeable contributors who read and contributed to Slashdot promptly took the article apart. So much so in fact, that the editor declared he would no longer publish the original, but would write a new version which could be used to pay the Slashdot contributors whose words made it into the final version. Writing about this episode for the online journal Salon, Andrew Leonard noted, "Just as open-source programmers would critique a beta release of software filled with bugs, the Slashdot readers panned the first release of Jane's journalistic offering, and the upgrade, apparently, will be quick to follow." (http://plugincinema.com/plugin/content/view/214/27/)
It was an idea once, and it made a lot of sense, but the idea has seemed kind of stagnant lately.
More Information
- http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/10/08/geek_journalism/
- On Wikipedia
- Brown, Barrett: "The Purpose of Project PM"
- Leonard, Andrew: "Open-Source Journalism
- LittleSis - "Profiling the powers that be"