Open sourced Journalism

 October 1999 the U.S.-based magazine Jane's Intelligence Review decided not to publish an article before allowing the mentioned Slashdot community to evaluate it; the article was criticized by Slashdot's visitors, w hereafter the editor withdrew the original piece and replaced it with on based on the critics' comments (see Leonard, 1999). This was a pure form of open source journalism: the use of so-called 'open' sources on the Internet to check facts. The term 'open-source' stems from the procedure to make software source codes openly available so that experts and regular users will find and correct glitches and modify the original code to their own benefit (O'Reilly, 1998). Open source journalism applies this principle to news stories - making them available for scrutiny and corrections before final publication (Moon, 1999). As Moon summarizes:

"Advocates of open-source journalism proclaim it as the new journalism, perfecting all that is wrong with traditional journalism. Others strongly oppose use of open sources, claiming the tactic will hinder the practice of traditional journalism and allow experts to wrest editorial control from journalists and the outlets for which they write"

The fundamental idea behind open source journalism can be seen as an advanced form of civic, public or community based journalism: involving the audience in the (manufacture of) news, creating a kind of user-generated content sites as Preecs writes idealistically:

"Open source journalism would be amateur journalism, journalism produced by citizens, scholars, community activists and other troublemakers just because we love the idea of creating, organizing or deploying the information that could save our planet and our souls."

The Internet as it wires millions of individuals as potential information experts into a global communications infrastructure provides an ideal platform for improving journalism by incorporating the expertise of people 'outside of the Rolodex'. It admittedly also blurs the boundaries of what one may see as journalism - but one can argue that this would be a top-down definition of journalism. Considering rising levels of education worldwide (especially in Western democracies) and increasing functional differentiation and developments towards further specialized 'niche' markets the inclusion of public (cf. 'open') experts seems to be not such a long shot as to providing a future for journalism in general. The potentials (and pitfalls) of open source journalism should therefore be explored, not discarded. An early example of support for this potential came from a survey among Dutch online journalists in 1999: 69% of these new media professionals agreed to the proposition that a strong interactive relationship with the audience is an essential building block for any news site