Distributed journalism via blogs... I'm just forwarding this to this list because we've chatted in the past about wikimedia and the possibility of a wiki-style news site.
----- Forwarded message from Mike Riddle mriddle@MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US -----
From: Mike Riddle mriddle@MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 16:58:04 -0500 To: FIREARMSREGPROF@listserv.ucla.edu Subject: Re: reason magazine
On Tue, 6 May 2003 16:47:37 -0500, Robert Woolley wrote:
There is an article in the 5/03 Reason magazine by Julian Sanchez (I think that's the name) about John Lott, Mary Rosh, and distributed investigative journalism by bloggers. It mentions this very list, as well as members of it, naturally.
The Mystery of Mary Rosh How a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle. By Julian Sanchez
Stories that might never be broken if a single reporter had to spend days researching them are now being covered by dilettante swarms rather than diligent professionals. It s a new form of journalism, reminiscent less of old- fashioned investigative reporting than of the decentralized "peer production" that generates open source software. If it had a slogan, it might be "We report, we decide."
New York University law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that open source works because programming is a "granular" task -- the job of coding a massive piece of software can be broken into many small pieces -- and because the Internet allows the rapid collating and peer filtering of work done by thousands of dispersed individuals. Traditional programming requires a few coders to commit a lot of time and effort, for which they will reasonably expect to be paid. When the software s source code is freely available, however, the big job can be done in small increments by a large pool of volunteers. The results are filtered for quality the same way, with superior pieces of coding copied and spread through the population.
Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same topic. The ability to concatenate that information online -- particularly via those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs -- makes the information discovered by each available to all.
To see the process in action, consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime.
[continues at http://www.reason.com/0305/co.js.the.shtml]
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