Open source journalism

[d f tweney]

Dear readers--

I haven't sent any messages to this group in nearly a year, so if you
have no idea why you're getting this message, here's a reminder. This
is a mailing list set up by me, Dylan Tweney, to send out occasional
updates and news about the projects I'm working on.

Since my last message, I've started working at Wired, where I'm
editing technology business news and features for Wired.com. I've been
here about 9 months, and it's one of the most challenging and
interesting journalistic jobs I've ever had.

Here's an item from my blog about some of the ways that we're tying
together traditional journalism, blogging, and social media at Wired.

I'd love to hear from you: Just write me at dy...@tweney.com or
dtw...@wired.com.

peace,

--dylan.



Open source journalism

Posted at http://dylan.tweney.com/2007/12/14/open-source-journalism/


At Wired, we've been experimenting with what we loosely call "open
source journalism" in a variety of ways. What we're learning is that
there's a fairly natural flow from quick blog posts to more fully-
cooked news stories, and it works something like this.

A reporter finds out about a breaking news story, and puts a quick
blog post up about it. If it's important enough, we'll feature that
blog post on the home page of <a href="http://
www.wired.com/">Wired.com</a> right away. In the meantime, the
reporter will continue working on the story: Calling sources, checking
facts, looking for additional details, and thinking through the
implications. As she discovers new information, she'll post it to the
blog, either as followup posts or as updates to the original item.

Eventually, for the bigger stories, we accumulate a series of blog
posts with a fair amount of original reporting in them. This can
happen over the course of a morning, a day, or even a couple of weeks.
At the same time, we start getting comments on the posts, and
occasionally those comments have additional information that leads us
in new directions. (We do read, and sometimes respond to, all our
comments.)

At this point, we can write a full-blown news story, incorporating
much of the reporting and even the copy from the blog posts, while
adding context, analysis, and a more standard news story structure.

The result is that readers can read any of Wired's 10 active news
blogs to get up-to-the-minute, relatively unfiltered news reporting,
almost as fast as we do it. Or you can follow Wired's home page (or
our <a href="http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index">Top Stories RSS feed</
a>) to get a slower, more filtered, more "cooked" news feed.

This process has worked well for us in covering some big stories, such
as the <a href="http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/
2007/05/digglegal">Digg user revolt</a> of May 2007, the Virginia Tech
shootings in April 2007, the iPhone launch, and coverage of a variety
of industry conferences. We also use it almost daily, on a host of
smaller stories.

But it's not fast enough. For some people, even the blogs are too
slow. That's why a number of us in the Wired newsroom are starting to
use Twitter, Facebook, and other social software to post about news
stories we're working on, even before we've blogged about them.

I'm making my <a href="http://twitter.com/dylan20">Twitter</a>, <a
href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=673566206">Facebook</a>,
and <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/dtweney">LinkedIn</a> pages
public, and other reporters are, too. I've also created a Facebook
group for the tech business news beat that I oversee -- it's called <a
href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7662301037">The Epicenter</
a>, and it's open to anyone who is interested in news about the tech
business.

It's all very experimental, and I'm not sure yet which media are going
to work best for long-term communication and collaboration on the
news. But my goal is to make something explicit about my work that has
actually been true for my entire career: I'm not just a source of
information, I'm also a hub for information, a conduit for
facilitating the flow of news and perspective.

I'll see you online.

UPDATE: Scott Karp has an interesting article on this topic called "<a
href="http://publishing2.com/2007/12/17/can-blogs-do-journalism/">Can
Blogs Do Journalism?</a>" The answer, of course, is yes, and not
surprisingly, blog publishers are discovering that daily news and
print journalists make pretty good bloggers.