Open-Source Investigative Journalism
Josh Marshall on investigative journalism:
"They take hundreds of hours to put together. It's very hard for them ever to pay in commercial terms. And blogs will almost never fill that role."
A closed-door method of investigative reporting takes a long time, but it could go a lot quicker if the on-the-record interviews were open-sourced and input was taken from the online community.
The Echo Chamber Project is an experiment to attempting to implement an open-sourced model of investigative reporting.
The Media Democratization Model below combines the principles of the scientific method and open-source development and applies it to journalism.
The following ten steps illustrate how this combination would work and how our corporately-controlled mainstream media could more actively incorporate input and feedback from members of society...
| 1. Journalists observe a phenomenon. | Beat reporters report on governmental rhetoric, behavior and other current events. |
| 2. Journalists and interested members of society form hypotheses to explain observed phenomenon. | Journalists solicit questions explanations of governmental behavior from the public through an interactive website. |
| 3. Journalists test these hypotheses by conducting either open or closed tests. | Journalists ask questions (both their own and society's) to various government officials and experts in either on-the-record (open) or off-the-record (closed) interviews. |
| 4. Journalists observe the result of each test. Hypotheses are either supported or contradicted, and additional testing is conducted until the formation of a hypothesis that best explains and predicts the observed phenomenon. | Journalists listen to the answers to their questions and ask a series of follow-up questions until they find the best explanation for the observed governmental rhetoric and behavior. |
| 5. Journalists form preliminary conclusions and report on them. | Journalists write their story using all of their collected information -- both the on-the-record and off-the-record interviews and other information from the public record. |
| 6. All of the transcripts of on-the-record interviews are released online and other public record information is cited in order to facilitate a peer review process. | The journalist has an open-source release of all of the material that he/she used to write the article. This encourages more transparency to the editing process, and further analysis and derivative articles can be created from a variety of different perspectives. |
| 7. Interested members of society participate in the peer review process via an interactive website. | Bloggers, activists, and concerned citizens can give feedback on the preliminary conclusions presented in the article. They begin to review the released information and provide additional supportive or contradictory evidence to the moderators and the public through the website. |
| 8. The journalist passes the open- and closed-source information to a panel of politically-representative moderators who oversee and direct the official peer review process. | All debates and conflicts from the public surrounding the preliminary conclusions are documented through the interactive website. All of these "letters to the editor" would be available online, but they would be able to include well-sourced facts and not just individual opinions. |
| 9. The panel of partisan editors collaboratively analyze the incoming factual evidence and agree on how to reform the preliminary conclusions. The reformed conclusions would incorporate the feedback from society and would be documented online. These reformed conclusions would be transmitted through additional objective news analysis articles or investigative reporting. | The follow-up stories that incorporate the public's feedback would initially have the largest market-share, but there would be a free market for follow-up analysis from bloggers, news magazines, and other print news outlets. The more information that is open-sourced and publicly available, the higher the quality of analysis that would be possible. |
| 10. The panel of moderators are free to write follow-up editorial pieces that represent their respective partisan views on conflicts that could not be collaboratively resolved by analyzing the facts. | There would inevitably be disputes that could not be resolved by an objective analysis of all of the facts, and these disputes should be able to be discussed in the context of op-eds written by the peer review moderators. |
