open-source journalism, and why it sucks

As online media becomes an increasingly acceptable reference source for news, reporters - both in paper and other mediums - have strugged to adapt. this story is a pretty good example of the bumps in the road we're seeing as the news industry struggles to figure out a method to incorporate sources like wikipedia in a streamlined, accurate manner. I don't envy these journalists - as online media affords people a greater degree of anonymity, fact-checking and attribution takes more time. Combine this fact with the rise of the instant news cycle, and you have a lose-lose situation for reporters. You can't ensure instant turnaround time and accuracy without increasing the resources available to reporters - and seeing as how the industry isn't exactly in a state of abundance right now, I suspect most newsrooms are having to make some decisions as to what's more important: getting it first or getting it right.

Maybe I shouldn't be making excuses for journalists, though. It's deeply troubling that wikipedia editors - unpaid volunteers - caught the lack of attribution for the fake quote twice, while papers such as the Guardian ran it without question. Like it or not, mainstream media is going to have to learn some lessons from more amateur editors, particularly when it comes to screening online information for accuracy. The perception of established media being more objective than online media is one of the few advantages newspapers hold over emerging models - squandering that would not be in the pape's best interests.

One potential solution to this problem is the concept of "open-source journalism" - allowing articles to essentially be peer-reviewed by readers before being published in a final form. The concept was put into practice waaaay back in '99 with a collaboration when an article on cyberterrorism from Jane's Intelligence Review was submitted to the readers of tech news website Slashdot for review before publishing. The readers tore it a new one, and the article ended up being rewritten - with commenters being paid for their critiques.

Admittedly, the model has certain strengths. Exposing a story to multiple perspectives and critiques will make for a stronger, fuller story, and as Fitzgerald and Wikipedia editors proved, amateurs can often provide insights that more traditionally trained journalists might not catch. However, there are some glaring weaknesses in this model that cast a lot of doubts on the model's ability to serve as a bridge between more traditional and new forms of media.

For starters, the exposure to multiple perspectives can be something of a double-edged sword - while the peer review aspect of open-source journalism can help to counter a single reporter's biases, it also can also influence an article in a negative way by subjecting it to the biases and opinions of others. Because online media (and especially political websites) cater to people's individual interests, you'll often find user communities that form based on very similar opinions and viewpoints. This raises some key doubts in my mind as to the effectiveness of open-source journalism via the internet - if you put a story up for revision based on the comments on either of the two websites I just posted, I doubt you'd have a particularly objective story by the time you were done.

Other issues with the open-source model are readily apparent as well. While user-driven revision may catch more errors made by journalists, it also increases the amount of time needed to put out an article. With today's instant-news pace, there's often barely time for even one edit, let alone multiple revisions (maybe this is a good thing, though - while it's probably impossible, slowing down the news cycle would allow for better understanding and filtration of truly important stories). Finally, the internet is a vastly different place than it was in 1999. The online news sphere is its own separate entity at this point, not a training ground for the final draft in the newspaper. Posting an article online is synonymous with publishing it, and you don't publish something you expect to further revise.

Open-source journalism just has too many gaping flaws for it to seriously be considered as a new way to adapt to online sourcing, that much is clear. But the questions and concepts behind the idea are ones that need to be addressed: online media provides a larger platform for users and readers to help and shape the news that's getting reported. Whatever method helps news organizations harness this potential will be a dominant force in the years to come.