Journalism lost its culture of sharing

[Scott Klein and Ben Welsh in Source]

I agree, strongly, with this piece about (re)building an open source culture in news by Scott Klein and Ben Welsh. But then, I would: I spent over a decade working to build open source communities, and then another decade and change working alongside and then inside newsrooms.

So it’s to my chagrin that the newsroom where I currently serve as Senior Director of Technology is one of the places listed here where open source contributions have significantly dropped off:

“At ProPublica, teams published detailed white papers alongside major investigations, explaining their quantitative methodologies with scientific rigor, allowing other researchers to verify and learn from their work. Major news organizations ran active blogs where they shared techniques and lessons learned. Conference presentations at NICAR and elsewhere became venues for passing along hard-won knowledge.”

The effect of this work didn’t just lift the work of journalism, it attracted new people to it:

“This culture made newsrooms more attractive places to work for civic-minded technologists. If you had programming skills and wanted to use them to make a difference, journalism offered you the chance to build things that mattered and share them with the world.”

I think there’s a lot to be gained by collaborating on an open source basis. We typically run small, resource-constrained teams where building new software is contextually hard. And we have problems that, if they’re not identical, are at least significantly overlapping; by not collaborating on them, we further an ecosystem where low-resource organizations are all solving the same sorts of things with very few people and very little money in parallel.

I was present at the News Product Alliance Summit session described in this piece, and I think the analysis of both the causes of this decline and some of the solutions are spot on. I was particularly enamored by the idea of an Open Source Editor (or director — does everything in news need to be an editor?) and public recognition for great open technical work in the field of journalism.

I think it’s also worth saying that open source, done well, is about much more than just releasing your code. A good open source project is a community, not a package. So there’s a lot of ecosystem development and community management involved to foster the kind of real collaboration that is required for this to succeed — even after newsrooms have overcome the institutional hurdles to releasing their work in the first place.

I’m really grateful that Scott and Ben have been championing this cause. I’m right there with them, and I’ll do what I can to help. It’s a concrete way we can build a more successful, efficient news ecosystem with stronger technology capabilities, and that’s something we should all want.

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