From reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar and from Tim O’Reilly what it is Web 2.0, it is possible to grasp the depth of the technologic revolution undergoing in front of our eyes. Coming from a world that did not have internet, digital cable, cell phones and so on, I tend to think -like probably many journalists do, about technology in a two dimensional way. Or, just to say it in a geek language, I have been thinking about it with my analog brain.
There is a huge concern in the industry and among journalists about what is it going to happen to journalism. The range of concern varies from the lost of job posts, to the disappearance of the Newspapers, to the vanishing of accountability journalism.
From every corner, thinkers and experts are proposing solutions to the problem: from teaching kids the love for journalism, to make the readers pay for content in the web. Just last week, Clay Shirky engage in an interesting debate with Steven Brill about the question: Will people pay for content online?
I think we, the people in the mass media industry, are missing the point. Totally. We are facing the emerging of new technologies like the only thing we need to do is to learn how to use them and the copy and paste our old business in the web, when in fact something much more radical is happening out there. I think we should be changing the paradigms about journalism. We need to pay a closer attention to the open source ideology.
The digital revolution is not just creating new ways to communicate. It is also establishing new ways to think and new ways to create.
One lesson I deducted from reading Eric S. Raymond is that web is dominated by an audience that refuse to be passive. If we were to apply few of the principles of the open source and the web 2.0 to journalism, I think we would find better answers to our concerns.
For example, let’s take some of the key elements Raymond describes in The Cathedral… : what you built with the cooperation of regular people is better and more realiable than what a lonely genius can do.
“Treating your users as co-developers it’s your least-hussler route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging”.
Replace “code” with “journalistic content” and “debugging” with “fixing error” and there you have it.
Some people would argue that Citizen Journalism have demonstrated that the idea of improving the content with the participation of “users” is a fallacy. I agreed that that experience seemed to have failed. But I think it was not because of the principle applied, but because the way it was done.
As Raymons puts it, for the open source to work well you can’t ask the people to help you built something from scratch. You need to provide the layout. Citizen Journalism failed because it wanted the users to do our work, mostly from scratch.
“It’s fairly clear that one can not code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode (…) Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with”, says Raymond.
I think what media and journalism online should be asking the readers it help us to “test, debug and improve” the content we are planning to develop. If we give the users the right to have an opinion about what we are planning to do, to tell us what news they would like us to report, they might be willing to pay for our salary.
