Rosen Mulling Reinventing Journalism Experiment
Jay Rosen just wrote in a continuing conversation over at his site:
Prodded by my friend Len Witt and conscience, I’m considering putting together over the weekend a PressThink thought experiment post, using the image of this hypothetical raid on a sleepy publisher in a market ripe for innovation, where the point is to win the local news and commentary franchise online by out-innovating the big providers.
Exactly how would we do that if “we” were to try? That’s the thought experiment.
Now this is really getting exciting. Good things are going to grow from this. Here is my response to Jay:
Jay, help in getting started:
When I did my PJNet.org interview with Phil Goldsmith about the Inquirer it got linked by Philly Future, a blog by Karl Martino. I checked out his site. Martino has a news and technology background and wants to look for ways to preserve great journalism. He should be contacted to help build a technological platform on which we can develop this reinvention of journalism. In fact, I already emailed him; an email from you too would reinforce that.
My only reservation so far is gearing it just towards a media guerilla action. Maybe it could be that, or maybe it could be working with the folks, let’s say, at the Philadelphia Daily News, who seem seriously interested in reinventing themselves and their newspaper. Here are some background links on what they are doing.
Or maybe it can be a plan for all the Knight Ridder papers, these are seriously motivated folks, and if they are not, well then they will lose anyway and we need not fret over their fate.
Any how, I will pledge a month of my free time to help make this happen. Probably much more once it cranks up. I was a magazine editor for more than 12 years so know how to synthesize information. We’ll need folks with specialized talents like Martino in technology and probably some copy editors too. (Funny, in the Rosen post I misspelled synthesize.)
Here is the most important message that Eric Raymond wrote in his groundbreaking open source essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar:
“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.”
This reinventing journalism can and will evolve into something really neat in the foreseeable future.
