Journalists and media organizations face a foundational crisis: the web challenges their traditional conceptions of what the end-product of journalism is.
The availability of open data, open publishing tools, and open licenses combined with the a low barrier for information access allows anyone with the time and motivation to transform into an investigative reporter, publisher, advertising, and marketing department, all at once. And more and more people are able to share, remix, and adapt any resulting content. This is new competition to an old media, and challenges top-down control of what news people read. This new competition is open journalism.
Before the web, media companies had based the business model of journalism on the physical constraints of media distribution. Here are two examples:
Locality: Newspapers, radio, and TV were only able to be directed at limited local audiences. As a result, there was a high level of competition between media at a local level (newspaper “turf wars”), each competing for their share of attention from a passive consumer base.
The medium: There are only so many radio frequencies to broadcast on, you can only print and distribute so much paper, there are only so many channels on TV, and so on. Editorial control was important in creating a concise, deliverable product, but left little room for a direct consumer voice.
On the web, there is no physical barrier to information. Location is almost irrelevant. No matter where you are, anyone can access your publications, blogs, tweets, articles, and opinions. There is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can distribute. And because of this, open journalism transcends the physical restraints on media that media companies had, to some degree, relied on to make their money.
Those in the business of journalism are struggling to re-conceive what their product is in the new paradigm of boundless information availability. There had always been some physical component to journalism that they could look at as their product. For the newspaper, it was the actual paper on which the news was printed. And as a result of this model, newspaper readers were seen as passive consumers of the news, only subscribing to receive filtered information about the world around them. Newspapers were delivered, not accessed.
But with the development of the web, different interactions with media have become feasible. The public doesn’t want to just be passive receptors of news. Instead, they want to share, remix, and create the news themselves. They want to be part of the media-creation process. But this forces the hard questions about where the value is in distributing news and media as a product.
Old media must re-conceive their product-based news model when confronted with open journalism.
While media companies are being forced to re-conceptualize the value they provide, journalists could preempt the failures of their supporting organizations by encouraging new interactions with their content. But what are these new kinds of media interaction, and how can a media company or journalist encourage these new behaviors?
In Part 2, I will start examining these new media interactions and discuss how an empowered journalist could use tools like Semantic MediaWiki, social media platforms, and Creative Commons licenses to encourage them.
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