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

Open source??

[CurlyG]

In what way was the embaressing tale of Gannon related to open source journalism? From everything I've heard about it he was a completely deliberate right-wing plant.

About the only question he didn't ask was

Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the
momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?

Re:Open source??

[argmanah]

In what way was the embaressing tale of Gannon related to open source journalism?

To answer your question, you need but read the article linked to in the story. Basically, the reason Gannon was exposed is because so many Bloggers (open source journalists) started writing about it, until there were so many articles about it on blogs that the mainstream media had no choice but to pick up the story.

The Gannon story is just an example of the power of open source journalism.

Re:Open source??

[pcidevel]

I'm very pissed at Kos for writing this today because for the last several weeks I've been intending to write in my dKos Diary about how the blogging of the Left has open sourced politics.

It's no where near exactly like right-wing radio in the 90s if you ask me, because right-wing radio still required a huge (and expensive) infrastructure that is no longer needed.

The real news behind the Gannon story isn't that bloggers blogged about it, but that it was mainly the work of blog READERS. It wasn't Kos or Atrios that really broke the story, it was the people who post comments and diaries at their sites. Those comments and diaries can be posted by anyone, so journalism is becoming much more open source. Regular people post comments, the best of those comments filter through to the site admins, the best of the stuff from the various sites filters through to the mainstream media.

I'm hoping that Dean realizes this is the OTHER legacy of his "sleepless summer", not only has he taken the Democrats back to real grass-roots fund raising, but he has also inadvertantly created the setup needed for open sourcing the message of the Democratic party. Instead of needing one brilliant campaign advisor with all the best ideas in the world, the Democrats now have thousands of relatively mediocre campaign advisors who each may have only one great idea. But if you can skim the Great Ideas from those people who otherwise have mediocre ideas the rest of the time, you end up with a deluge of Great Ideas, much more than any one brilliant campaign advisor will ever be able to give you. It's exactly the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but taken from the arena of computers and moved into politics.

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.

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.

Re:No, I do not think so

[de1orean]

if you'd look at the DailyKos diaries, you'd see the unprecedented level of collabo among all the folks who dig the logwork... it's damned impressive. link

Correction:

[NoseBag]

Actually, according to the WH:

"White House press secretary Scott McClellan said (James D.) Guckert (his real name)did not have a regular White House press pass but was cleared on a day-by-day basis to attend briefings and used his real name."
(parenthetic comments mine)

"Questions"

[ortcutt]

It might be charitable to even call Gannon/Guckert's comments "questions". Here are some highlights--or should I say lowlights--from his distinguished career.

May 10, 2004: "Q In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like 'sickening,' 'disgusting' and 'reprehensible.' Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?"

MR. McCLELLAN: "I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often."

July 15, 2004: "Q Last Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that shows that Ambassador Joe Wilson lied when he said his wife didn't put him up for the mission to Niger. The British inquiry into their own prewar intelligence yesterday concluded that the President's 16 words were 'well-founded.' Doesn't Joe Wilson owe the President and America an apology for his deception and his own intelligence failure?"

April 1, 2004: "Q I'd like to comment on the angry mob that surrounded Karl Rove's house on Sunday. They chanted and pounded on the windows until the D.C. police and Secret Service were called in. The protest was organized by the National People's Action Coalition, whose members receive taxpayer funds, as well as financial support from groups including Theresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation.

MR. McCLELLAN: "I would just say that, one, we appreciate and understand concerns that people may have. I would certainly hope that people would respect the families of White House staff."

Feb. 10, 2004: "Q Since there have been so many questions about what the President was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else's medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting?"

Open Source Journalism?

[null etc.]

Open source politics, open source activism, open source journalism -- the aggregation of thousands on behalf of a common cause.

There's a few thousand people aggregated on behalf of a common cause at Microsoft's campus - I'd hesitate to call that Open Source.

Open Source isn't a particularly good word to describe journalism.

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.

Is this really open source?

[mrighi]

It's interesting how the definition of "open source" has changed over the last few years. It used to be that I only ever heard "open source" associated with software. After all, software is built from source code.

It seems like the phrase "open source" is being confused with the similar, but different, "free to use", "free speech" or "freedom of expression." We hear about open source journalism, open source biology, open source research and even open source beer.

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing... I'm just making an observation. It makes me wonder if in twenty years from now, when new countries are writing their constitutions, will they guarantee their citizens "open source rights?"

Re:Thanks for the textbook example.

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, while the White House still hasn't answered questions like "which name was on Guckert/Gannon's day passes", he very clearly scammed his way in. You don't know the answer, either, unless... is that you, McClellan? Still trying to get those softball questions across the media radar, huh? I guess requiring questions in advance, and paying journalists to spin your press releases isn't enough - you're really putting in the overtime.

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.

Re:That's completely untrue

[grcumb]

"Gannon (or Guckert, if you prefer) resigned over links to inappropriate pornography. These links were uncovered during what basically amounted to a witch hunt."

It's true that some people have crowed about the hypocrisy of an openly right-wing pundit being associated with gay sex sites. It's also true that some people have said that this hypocrisy is the story. BUT it's also true that the people doing the original research have decried this time and again. They've said repeatedly that this is not the story.

Of course, if you'd read the group's press release, you'd already know that there is not one word about the gay sex sites. Some cranks may be crowing about a photo of Gannon/Guckert in tighty-whiteys, but the people who are doing the actual research are deliberately not. They seem to think it's enough that a guy with two days' training, working for a news organisation that was four days old should be able to get a White House press pass using a false name. They also find it strange that on many occasions 'Gannon' wrote articles in which text lifted directly from Republican press briefings appeared unattributed. Most importantly, they worry that he might have been used to leak a story that resulted in an undercover CIA operative being outed. That last one is a felony offense, and is punishable by hard time in a federal prison.

For some small-minded people it's about the gay sex sites. For most, though, it's about the systematic subversion of the Free Press.