Open Source Journalism

jvm writes "Markos of Daily Kos wrote today of what he describes as the legacy of blogging: open source. Not software, but the philosophy. From the article: "When I'm asked about blogging's legacy, I talk about open source. Open source politics, open source activism, open source journalism -- the aggregation of thousands on behalf of a common cause." Relatedly, egoff writes "You might have seen some coverage of Jeff Gannon, a conservative reporter who lobbed softball questions during White House press briefings. It was discovered that he was using an alias to get past White House security. The language of open source development is used throughout their description of the reporting process. At Poynter Online, journalists discussing this story have compared the random blog readers who did the bulk of this research to "what Woodstein did back in the day.""

Comments

I'd say a better example,

[Hawthorne01]

is the dismantling of CBS's attempt to flaunt the(obiviously) fake National Guard memos as evidence of Bush's slacking off in the Texas Air National Guard. Whether you agree if Dubya did such or not, the way the various conservative blogs built off each other in chasing down that fraud and exposing the sloppy journalism of CBS is a model for future "open-source journalism" efforts.

I, myself, watch the watchmen.

Re:I'd say a better example,

[grcumb]

"First, they blew it because Mary Mapes was following an agenda, not a story."

Oh, for crying out loud. Can we please stop with this 'agenda' thing? The issue is not and has never been about agendas or bias. Why do we care for a second whether a person is a right- or left-winger? The only thing any of us should be caring about is THE TRUTH.

Were Mapes and Rather lazy when they researched the TANG story? Yes! They had lots of valid evidence but they allowed it to be tainted by an obviously forged document. This document completely discredited the rest of the work they did.

Is it unusual that a man with two weeks of training from a political 'think-tank', belonging to a news organisation that had only been publishing for a few weeks at the time, gets accredited to the White House under a false name? You bet is.

Does it seem even stranger that this neophyte is one of the first Washington journalists to find out who Valerie Plame is? Yep.

Can we say more than that? NO!. Nothing is proven yet. We have evidence of problems, and SusanG and company at DKos are looking into it because the mainstream media won't. That is at one and the same time a good and a bad thing. It's good because it's empowering to us that we can do it; it's bad because the mainstream media should have made a story of this two years ago.

We're only doing this investigation because the the media don't seem to care about the truth any more. This is a terrible thing, and we have the tools to fix it. I suggest, therefore that we stow allegations and innuendo, and allow the facts to speak for themselves.

Re:I'd say a better example,

[Anonymous Coward]

but then, don't forget we have a reason to be biased against you... "reality" we like to call it.

Re:I'd say a better example,

[As Seen On TV]

None of the other members of the White House press corp attempts to conceal their identity as he did.

Mike Allen and Jim Engel both use pen names. There's another one, a female reporter whose pseudonym I can't remember unfortunately. And those are just the ones I can think off of the top of my head.

Gannon/Guckert is not a journalist.

So? I don't recall the clause in the first amendment limiting the freedom of the press to people with j-school degrees.

he doesn't work for a legimimate news outlet.

How do you define "legitimate?" More importantly, why do you define "legitimate," if it's not to exclude people you don't like?

His function at press conferences appears to have been to save the ass of Scott McLellan or the President by asking softball questions.

His "function," if you want to call it that, was to ask whatever questions he wanted to ask, just like every other reporter in the press room. The fact that he asked questions that you don't like doesn't mean he doesn't belong there. Hell, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who doesn't think Helen Thomas spent her last few years in the briefing room as an openly partisan hack, but nobody called for her removal. Because we have a free press, you see.

No, I do not think so

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is a method of collaboration. People come together and use the methods and tools of open source development to allow their disparate skills and goals to reach a common productive endpoint.

Blogging is a zillion people who disagree with each other on everything all yelling at the same time and hoping that they'll attract a big enough crowd to sustain themselves, and other people come in and selectively listen to just the yelling people that make them feel good about themselves.

Open Source and Blogging both approach the same point, the same goal: diversity, whether diversity of software usage or diversity of viewpoints. But they approach it from the opposite direction.

I also question whether Blogging is perhaps being a little presumptuous in comparing itself to the open source movement. The open source movement has left behind a series of useful and generally usable software programs which are continually improving, but which would still have some real utility if all new development ceased tomorrow. Blogging's legacy is pretty much just a series of articles on the subject of how important blogging is.

Worth noting...

[Ars-Fartsica]

...that last year's "big story" (Dan Rather falsification of Bush military records controversy), was broken by bloggers.

Big Media (NYTimes, etc) long term are in no better shape than record or film companies. They claim to be the arbiters of intellectual property but in reality we see that once you eliminate manufacturing and distribution costs, they are no better or no different than a guy in his basement. These firms were not in fact media firms but manufacturers and distributors.

Blogging != OpenSource.

[jericho4.0]

WTF? Opensource is a licenceing method, not a way for people to work together. It encourages people and companies to contribute to work others started because they know it will not be used for the benefit of one, but the benefit of all.

I fail to see the similarity to bloggers, who seem (at least the majority)to be more concerned about getting people to pay attention to them.

Open Source Journalism

[BossMC]

I would like to welcome Open Source Journalism. I can't stand it when I open a newspaper and the damn thing is in some proprietary format!

Open Journalism

[Doc Ruby]

Because it's closed. Just like developing stories in traditional broadcast media. Bloggers share developing info, blur the lines between drafts and releases for early access, share across competing organizations. That's a lot like open source, where the source is the text of the stories, and the repository is the blogs themselves. It's certainly the "bazaar" to the traditional media's "cathedral".

Kos' Open Source Factoids For Ya

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, folks.
1) That Kos guy really appreciates the /. community. He appreciates the fact that a bunch of people come together bringing a variety of knowledge and fleshing out issues.
What the DKos site has morphed into over the past couple of years is similar but different.
There is a diary part of the site where people can have their own blogs. This provides additional content to the site and often good observant posts are promoted to the front page.
The "Gannon" story was researched because someone started the ball rolling and asked for others to help out in answering questions. Other DKos posters pitched in and together they put together a story. They pursued something which the Main Stream Media hadn't done to that point. And, even if various outlets beyond the Boston Globe pursued it, they would have had 1-3 journalists interviewing, fact-checking and finding leads.
That "old school" process is slower though it often gets the story right and occasionally, like the 60 Mins II story on Dubya's Nat'l Guard papers, gets it wrong.
The open source angle is simple: a bunch of people who do not know one another get one another's back and fact-check using the Net and interview and do leg work to verify or discredit a story. With facts.
Like Reagan once said, Facts are stubborn things.
"Open source journalism" ain't perfect, does seem self-congratulatory and is a result of the Me-too generation. But, if New Media doesn't work like this occaisionally, are you going to rely on getting less information from the oldschoolers? Are you going to tune out to news when the Jesus Juice trial in Califonia takes up the Old Media's attention as they tell us everything which does NOT matter to our daily lives?

2) Kos helped set up the software for Dean back before the Scream. He was a consultant who helped develop the entire architecture for the blogging apparatus for the Dean campaign. That software is open source. In fact, everything on the DKos site is open source, both the constantly updated code and the content. Just scroll to the bottom of the main page to see that you can use anything on the page without attribution or paying royalties.
You could make your own blog site with diaries using that code. Or you can cite any content without rubbing anyone the wrong way.
Peace out.

Re:McClellan Irregulars

[Doc Ruby]

We have this familiarity with "strawman arguments". It's when someone picks the argument they want their opponent to have, instead of the one they're actually facing, and argue with the "strawman". I haven't said that anyone should be disallowed to report or comment (even those with nothing but meaningless or stupid reports and commentaries, though I wish they'd shut up of their own accord). I do say that Gannon/whatever was a plant. Because he was let into WH press briefings, a necessarily selective group, in a unique scenario that has been detailed elsewhere. After being denied a Capitol Hill pass. Without a background check that could have dug up a lot more than this "gay" smokescreen, if he were dangerous - but that wasn't even performed. While the WH is revealed to be paying other journalists for similar astroturfing. They still have the right to report the "news". But they don't have a right to pretend they're not plants, shills for a complicit White House. Like I say, let's see how far this one goes.

Re:That's completely untrue

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt. Wrong. Take the RNC talking points elsewehere.

The facts are: A "reporter" using a fake name, gets a perpetual daily pass into the white house while working for a news organization that is 4 days old and is funded by GOPUSA.

The story is: How did this person get past security and admitted and re-admitted to the press pool on a daily basis (could anyone else here do that) without being connected? Was someone allowing the security to be bypassed to bring in the ringer? If so, who...

The military gay sex porn sites stuff is ironically funny, but not the real issue.

Hilarious! Eason Jordan resigns

[Kenrod]

At almost the exact moment this Kos suck-up story was posted, Eason Jordan, CNN News Chief, was resigning!

His resignation follows weeks of right-wing blogosphere activism over his comments that the US military was deliberately targeting journalists.

So what's a bigger story - left-wing bloggers busting an unknown right-wing "journalist" working the system to lob a couple of softballs at President Bush, or right-wing bloggers busting the freaking head of CNN news?

A piss poor example.

[Visceral Monkey]

Markos is a piss poor example of anything other than an over inflated sense of self-worth and ego. A better example of what he's talking about would be the National Guard story that CBS shat out on the world. That's not to say the example cited isn't news worthy, but holding it up as an example without even discussing the other more worthy ones is a joke. Liken it to holding up the Mexican-American war as an example of how countries fight wars as opposed to WWII. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

So What About Slashdot?

[miller60]

I'm a big fans of blogs and blogging. But Slashdot pioneered open source journalism - in all senses of the term - long before the blogs gained momentum. Tech journalists have been getting story leads from Slashdot for years. Now political reporters are getting story leads from blogs, and suddenly it's a revolution! The model for open source journalism exists, right here. The blogs are simply broadening the installed base of participants.

Rather (CBS), Jordan (CNN)... Gannon??!?

[smitth1276]

Why is Kos getting so worked up over a reporter noone has ever heard of who works for a news agency that noone has ever heard of... ??? Meanwhile--in the real world--"open-source journalists" have held to account (forced resignation or retirement of) 2 huge media figures: Dan Rather at CBS and Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN.

I guess it's better to arrive late than never, but let's not pretend that "bringing down" whats-his-name Gannon even approaches the level of significance of Rather and Jordan.

The fact that the media chooses this particular incident to extoll the virtues of "open source journalism" betrays their true motives.

BTW, if I made any typos or weird sentences, no smarmy comments... its late.