"Constructing a Framework to Enable
An Open Source Re-Invention of Journalism"
by Leonard Witt
in First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet
Leonard Witt is the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University outside of Atlanta. He is the past chair of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He blogs frequently on public, open source, and citizen journalism issues at his Public Journalism Network blog, PJNet.org (http://pjnet.org/).
E–mail: Lwitt [at] kennesaw [dot] edu
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Abstract:
This article builds upon open source/open content literature and applications to develop a framework from which academics, citizens, critics, journalists and the media industry can collectively develop a sustainable model or models to save quality journalism — possibly by reinventing journalism as it has traditionally been defined. This article provides that framework, not so much as a theoretical construct, but rather as an annotated checklist to guide those interested in reinventing journalism.
Some excerpts:
"The traditional news media models are being disrupted by the likes of Weblogs, craigslist, Google, eBay, and Monster.com (American Press Institute, 2005).
However, the erosion of the mass news media dominance is not something that has suddenly occurred in the last few years. Philip Meyer (2005) has been warning the newspaper industry for years [3] that they were slowly losing audience to niche markets and youth was neither buying nor reading their products."
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"Successful experiments in open source, citizen journalism ... like Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California, are adaptations affiliated with traditional newspapers and others like BaristanetNJ in Essex County, New Jersey, and H2Otown in Watertown, Massachusetts are tiny local start–ups serving their own small communities (Northwest Voice, 2006; BaristanetNJ, 2006; H2Otown, 2006)."
"Dan Gillmor (2004), who literally wrote the book on citizen journalism — entitled We the media: Grassroots journalism for the people, by the people — learned just how hard it is to reinvent journalism. Bayosphere, his own citizen journalism experiment, faltered within one year. He would write (Gillmor, 2006a in Bayosphere), “Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site’s purpose is and what tasks are required."
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"Some newsrooms are already familiar with civic mapping, where they actually do a schematic drawing of their communities, including whom is in charge and how groups interact (Schaffer, 2002). The ecosystem might be put online as a visual representation for the public to see. Everyone could add new groups and subgroups, add comments about groups, and even move the groupings around to get a fuller understanding of the ecosystem’s dynamics. Beth Simone Noveck (2005) argues that these visual representations, aided by technology already present in online community building games, produce new possibilities for getting citizens involved in deliberative exercises."
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"The days of three national television networks and monopoly newspapers are gone or waning. Distribtuion platorms can include special interactive computer sites, but also mobile phones, PDAs, iPods and all the other gadgets that audiences have or will have access to in the future. However, with those platforms come practical questions about design, information accessibility, and levels of interactivity. With interactivity comes questions of filters for quality control, and perhaps automated trust and ranking system."
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"When you start community–building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn’t have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential co–developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future."