Open-source journalism

"So here we see another form of the power shift. The users have more power, not only because they can self-publish but also because they can pool their knowledge, and criticise superficial treatments in the professional media. Knowing this, Jane’s decided to make the users co-authors, which expresses the new balance of power I just talked about. That site, slashdot.org, was one of the first really effective online communities. So this piece in Salon, also from 1999, is an example of an extremely important insight that my friend Dan Gillmor had, again in 1999. Gillmor first got turned on to how powerful blogging would be when he saw a demo from – guess who? – Dave Winer. Winer showed him how “edit this page” worked. He talked Gillmor into starting a blog at the San Jose Mercury News , where he was a columnist and reporter on Silicon Valley. As the first newspaper journalist to have a blog, Gillmor realised something crucial: “My readers know more than I do.” In the aggregate, that is. This is the same thing Jane’s realised. Exactly, which over time wears away at the trust that is necessary for serious journalism to exist. So combine “my readers know more than I do” with “open source journalism” and “the sources go direct”, and you have a reply to that problem. In some ways, yes. Except we have to modify it to, “Our readers are located in more places than we are”, or, “Our readers are more connected to each other than we are”. Put them together and what do you have? News, like an earthquake in LA, that breaks first on Twitter. Or coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that was originally dominated by users with cameras who were on scene. One of the big unsolved – but not necessarily unsolvable – problems in the new pro-am [professional-amateur] system is that it does not come to us with a working reputation system. So yes, “Who are these people?” is a problem. Anonymity is a problem. The flood of garbage is a problem. What some call the echo chamber effect is a problem. There are dozens of these practical problems. The new system isn’t a turnkey device. It has huge weaknesses."