How We All Can Help Reinvent Quality Journalism
Even the slightly critical responses to my earlier Romenesko letter Wanted: Stories on how to save good journalism demonstrate that collective action by academics, critics, the industry, journalists and citizens can produce “ideas for the future of journalism that will guarantee its rightful place in a functioning democracy.”
In open source software development, someone comes up with an idea for a program. He or she starts writing the program. Then releases early and often each time knowing full well it will have bugs. Then people who want to use the program, report the bugs, while at the same time hackers jump in and write pieces of programming to help fix the bugs. And sometimes the users and hackers are the same people. By the way, in open source programming hackers are the good guys.
The open source program owner identifies the best hackers, or the potentially best aspiring hackers, and strives to get them more and more involved in the program writing, while at the same time filtering out the not so great hackers.
That’s what is happening here. I wrote an imperfect idea, but one that I believe was solidly grounded. Then the idea hackers pointed out the bugs and wrote tiny pieces of “programming” to help fix it.
“The press seems to think that their product tells the customer why they need it. Well it doesn’t. And any other industry that was smacking itself in the teeth while shooting itself in the foot would understand it needed professional help to get a better message about itself across to the over-mediated masses.
“The resulting publicity campaign would remind everyone how much they need brand x, and how the people producing brand x are as dedicated as saints and as cute as puppies. Oh, and by the way, if we didn’t have brand x, we’d be screwed. Journalism is to corruption what soap is to germs. Would you want to go back to a time when raw sewage flowed down the streets? I don’t think so. But hey – keep skipping the newspaper and you’ll be up to your necks in s—.”
So if I would be reprogramming digital-age journalism that “will guarantee its rightful place in a functioning democracy,” I would add Butterworth”s bit of programming to the mix. Then in that next release, someone, in this case my wife Diana, might say, “Oh, I have a good idea for a PR campaign. Let’s use the words ‘Fair and Balanced’ that will guarantee respect for journalists.”
Okay, so as a user Diana found a flaw, now it is up to an idea hacker to fix that possible flaw in Butterworth’s piece of programming, and it is up to me as the program owner, to incorporate that fix into the program.
In the case of Frank Hayes he pointed out a bug–no delivery system ideas–but has not really added to the program writing. As the owner, I would ask Hayes: “Can you write some concrete ideas that will make the program work better?” If not, fine. Criticism alone is welcome. We can only get better if we allow the outside world to point out the faults or bugs in our program–and to tell us what they require as users of the system.
Mark Pinsky and Steve Doig opened a thread about quality, which might only be just a few lines of programming in the final product, or maybe in time what they wrote, or even everything I have written, gets rewritten out of existence if someone in the future writes better coding that builds and finally replaces their original programming ideas.
Doig, and also Steve Outing via email, pointed me to great ideas for keeping investigative reporting alive in the future. Doig referred me to the IRE’s Extra! Extra! And Outing to his recent column entitled: Investigative Journalism: Will It Survive?
If both those above ideas were also open source in the spirit of the Creative Commons, I could pick them up in whole or in part, just drop them in place, add a little programming glue to make them fit in the bigger program and give credit to the authors, and that would be it.
I received five or six more constructive links via email that would drive me to places like Fabrice Florin’s NewsTrust, Tim Porter’s First Draft, Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog and Jay Rosen’s blog on making Knight-Ridder local.
Look at all the information I could compile–from idea hackers — in just a couple of days after writing my initial letter. Now multiple that by weeks and months, plus having other people joining me and reaching out further than I could on my own and who knows–the results might be a Linux like equivalent of a newly invented journalism.
In fact, every major and minor news organization in the country also should be using this model with their audiences on how to recreate themselves. Take The New York Times for example. Rather than proprietary, secret thinking with a couple of dozen creative thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, who is a consultant for them, why not open it up to the whole world with Jarvis leading the thinking, being the program owner, the lead idea programmer discovering how to save the best of the New York Times. Linus Torvalds with Linux already proved the power of this collective thinking. The new media and their audiences just have to adapt it for quality journalism.
I might add, I wrote the first letter and now this second in my pajamas in my little bedroom office. I mention that because developing new programming ideas doesn’t require tons of bricks and mortar nor massive corporate support.
It is a gift economy. I make a modest salary as a college professor and here I am willing to give my ideas away. Why? Because of my passion for quality journalism and it is intellectually stimulating. That’s the public answer. But the inner answer probably also includes wanting some recognition which will build my prestige in the field. That’s the ego thing working plus when I came out of journalism and into academia, Jay Rosen told me my most important role as an academic would be to produce intellectual capital. So the motivating factors in getting idea hackers involved will include passion, emotional or intellectual stimulation, recognition, prestige and wanting to be like your role models or better yet being accepted into their circles.
If you look at the research on what motivated software hackers, you will see it’s not much different than from what is motivating me. You do good works, share your gifts with others and you will be rewarded later with recognition and praise, it is sort of like the path to heaven. And what’s wrong with that model?
Of course, for this model to work we must believe the other has something to offer. In the open source software movement, hackers were embedded in the leading universities, but also were at times teenagers with no formal higher education–anyone who could write excellent code was invited into the party.
That’s why in my initial letter, call it the 1.0 edition of this thought stream, I said academics, critics, the industry, journalists and citizens must work collectively to save quality journalism. Unfortunately, right now each seems to think the other is incompetent or clueless. Journalists think academics have no sense in how the real world works. Citizens, if the polls are correct, lump journalists with used car salespeople. Journalists think of themselves as the professionals and their audiences, if they think of them at all, as totally ignorant of how journalism works. On the industry side, corporate ownership is being vilified and strong family ownership–think Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. of The New York Times– are taking it on the chin too.
What’s really crazy about all that animosity is that the majority of all the constituent groups want the same thing–sustainable journalism. So what if we all actually grabbed hold of the same rope and pulled in the same direction. We might be able to pull journalism, which is spinning its wheels, out of its present quagmire.
We already know that journalists and industry officials, even if they are suspect in delivering creative ideas, can, at least, provide all the inside information we need. Citizens? What can they provide? Well, go read Kevin Kelly’s recent piece in Wired, We Are the Web, where he says,
“Everything media experts knew about audience–and they knew a lot–confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead. Music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen. Video production was simply out of the reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or, if they would happen, it would not draw an audience. Or if they drew an audience, that audience would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds.”
And here is the keystone of his thoughts: “What we failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone’s ten-year plan.”
Finally, a plug for academia of which I am now a part. Journalists tend to dismiss academics, but at their own peril. Let me give you two examples.
Here is what Jack Shafer, Slate media critic, wrote back in 2000, while taking a poke at Jay Rosen, a professor at New York University:
…if Rosen really wants to frame his debate–and his call to arms–around some imagined “crisis” in American journalism, let him make a better case about how awful things are…Journalism ain’t broke, and Rosen isn’t the man to fix it even if it is.
Philip Meyer, professor at University of North Carolina, was asked at a conference this summer if newspapers are in a death spiral. With a big chart projected next to him, he responded:
The answer is yes, and there’s probably nothing we can do about it. This is a picture of the death spira–it’s not a spiral, it’s more of a straight line. I showed an earlier version of this chart in this same hotel about ten years ago, to a meeting of newspaper feature writers, and one of them looked at that and pointed to the chart and said, “No, that is not happening.” Denial is a pretty good way to deal with something like this. As Garrison Keillor once said, “Some problems are so bad, the only thing to do is to look at them and deny them.”
Five years ago, ten years ago, those out of touch academics were predicting where we are today. The only thing they have gotten wrong is how shockingly fast the demise seems to be taking place.
So my point is: academics, critics, the industry, journalists and citizens should work collectively to save quality journalism. Each can write their own parts of the program for a reinvented journalism for the future.
The final piece of this puzzle is the platform. Where will this collective, open source, idea programming for a reinvented journalism take place. I would say right here at PJNet.org. Or Poynter Online might be a nice place to start. People already started sending idea and critiques. Plus have citizen-oriented feeder sites set up via news media sites nationwide so the ideas come from across the spectrum from the ivory towers, newsrooms, corporate offices and from the kitchens and bedrooms of everyday citizens.
From that the best idea hackers can be identified and groomed and the coding written that will help save, and perhaps even reinvent, what quality journalism will be in this digital age.
