This month's edition of First Monday, an online peer-reviewed journal of media studies, includes an intriguing paper by Leonard Witt, a journalism professor from Kennesaw State University (Ga.).
Check out: Constructing a framework to enable an open source reinvention of journalism. OK, it's an academic paper, so the language is rather thick and pedantic. But he makes some good points.
Of course, the term "open source" is rather fuzzy and abused in the context of media and journalism. It wouldn't be my first choice -- but then, it's not my paper. Most of what Witt discusses involves citizen journalism and other kinds of participatory, conversational, or collaborative media.
Here's one tip from the article I especially like:
"It should be wise for each news media company to try to determine its own ecosystem. Some newsrooms are already familiar with civic mapping, where they actually do a schematic drawing of their communities, including whom is in charge and how groups interact (Schaffer, 2002). The ecosystem might be put online as a visual representation for the public to see. Everyone could add new groups and subgroups, add comments about groups, and even move the groupings around to get a fuller understanding of the ecosystem's dynamics. Beth Simone Noveck (2005) argues that these visual representations, aided by technology already present in online community building games, produce new possibilities for getting citizens involved in deliberative exercises."
That sounds very cool indeed. Has anyone done something like this? I'll have to investigate that further.
In 2002 ASNE published a good primer on civic mapping by Jan Schaffer.
Today, Reinventing College Media published an interview with Leonard Witt about how his ideas might apply to college media. Worth reading -- not just for the content, but because it's a great example of a Q&A piece crafted from an interview conducted via instant messaging.
(Thanks to Bryan Murley for the tip.)
Since you brought up the question of language, I can't...
