…and why they could be the keys to innovating both the business and the system of journalism.
Image by tiana_pb used under a Creative Commons license.
“Newsosaur” blogger and media consultant Alan Mutter some time ago suggested that journalism has become a lot more like Silicon Valley. Newspapers are too risk-averse, he said, and so they “need some fresh DNA that will make them think and act more like techies and less like, well, newspaper people.”
When Seth was at the Hacks/Hackers hack day at ONA11 last month, as part of his larger project studying Hacks/Hackers, he mentioned this idea to Phillip Smith, a digital publishing consultant who has been instrumental in the...
Go on and click the Nieman Lab link directly above. Read the piece. While it's recasting a message heard before it comes at it with some fresh insight and perhaps with better timing. The main insight is that news organizations can learn not from the greedy business side of Silicon Valley but from the open-source, "maker's mindset" of Silicon Valley. Distributive knowledge.
And the timing may be better because, well, go see all the recent pieces cited and you get a 2011 version of the argument.
Mozilla is readily cited here too -- and that resonates with me because they've been reaching out to public media. They make a natural non-profit ally as we plot open-source progressions of journalism.
My own call for innovation labs can take a cue from this article. The power of sharing between the labs was totally understated in my original proposal at Stanford. Journalist Jason Alcorn advised me of this and urged a reformatting in which the deliverable of the innovation lab concept include a common product yielded by the distributed lab model. I'm working on it.
Back to this article, it distills some markers of progress:
1. New tools, stage one (already happening)
2. New tools, stage two (soon to happen)3. New thinking: A maker mindset + open source (a major cultural shift in journalism)
4. New frameworks: The story as code (now a new way of working is established)
And it ends with caveats about scaling this widely enough to include lots of "makers"... and that it needs some form of leadership. Oh yeah. That.
Public media has great potential in this framework.
