Here’s my speech presenting this paper, given on Monday, Dec. 12, as part of a panel at the National Press Club titled “Opening Up Journalism: A Culture Change.” The event was hosted by USC Annenberg and moderated by its Director of Journalism and Professor Geneva Overholser. Nikki B. Usher, assistant professor or journalism at George Washington University and recent Annenberg, Ph.d., presented her findings on the growing influence of open-source software thinking in newsrooms.

I’ve modified the opening for this blog post.
***
Today I’m here to talk to you about my online discussion paper called “The Case for Open Journalism Now.”

The only thing I regret about this title is that I didn’t capitalize the word NOW — or perhaps add an exclamation point. I feel a sense of urgency about the need for change that can increase journalism’s connection and relevance in the digital era – and that can help build support for this work as a public good. Open journalism offers an orienting idea for such change.

I’m encouraged by ways this is beginning to happen among new newsrooms and also among some traditional media. Nearly every day I find a new example. For instance, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column in late October asking his readers over 70 to share their “life reports.” He began publishing them in November, putting one per day on his blog. This isn’t a traditional role for an esteemed op-ed columnist, yet it made instant sense to thousands of readers who responded. And it’s been wonderful to read.

More examples abound among online only and startup sites and new entities that use information to connect communities. I’ve linked to dozens of examples of open journalism in my web paper. I also put together a hundred other links to arguments, ideas and illustrations of open journalism as a sidebar element. Some of those links connect to blog posts, reports and speeches by a variety of people who have argued in recent times for the need and potential for more open approaches in journalism.

Despite all the recent action, I’m discouraged by how slow journalism has been in seizing the opportunities of two-way communication to improve what we do. I mean improve journalism — not just by using new tools but by forging better relationships between newspeople and those who support and depend on our work – and with others who inform communities.

It’s been 40 years since the internet was developed and 20 since the web came into being. New media are not even new anymore. Yet too much of our energy in journalism has focused on new ways to deliver old ideas instead on fresh approaches to provide what people need today.

We need a conceptual leap now in how we define journalism’s role and how we do its jobs. We need to focus first on the service we’re providing and then on how to deliver it.

I like this idea of service because it applies to both civic and commercial value. That’s important as we’re asking people to support journalism financially in increasing ways through digital subscriptions, donations and philanthropy to fund important coverage. I might pay for the service of someone keeping watch on my local government and telling me when something needs my attention. Specialized information and tailored delivery also are services. People certainly pay to be entertained. Many others support public media because they believe in the mission, not just the format.

Open journalism begins with this notion of service. It recognizes that many people in our society have a stake in quality journalism and can contribute to it. And it applies ideas that have a lot of currency in journalism to the processes of journalism itself.

What are those ideas? Well, let’s start with transparency. Open journalism involves being proactive in telling consumers who we are, what we aim to do and how we operate. How do we know what we report and how can you check our work? With so many competitors providing information and news, consumers need ways to separate credible sources from others. This is one area where journalism providers can do better without new cost.

Open journalism involves responsiveness. If your organization offers an invitation to comment or asks people to follow you on social networks, but you don’t answer questions posted in those spaces, what is your message? Where is the value?

Open journalism says that news providers are accountable. Most newsrooms think they are, but I invite you to visit mainstream news sites online and try to quickly find out — I mean in less than 3 clicks — who’s in charge, how to report an error or how to give a news tip.

Open journalism involves dialogue and participation among newspeople, sources and contributors. This happens as part of the journalism rather than as an add-on. It can involve user photos and comments but it isn’t a forgotten corner of the website labeled “user generated content.”

And open journalism works through networked connections. It links out — to source material and to relevant web references. It establishes news people as active participants – in their roles as journalists – in a universe of information sharing.

The ideas of open journalism lend themselves heavily to digital communication but extend to all the ways newspeople can serve communities. It can involve in-person meetings, bringing the community into newsrooms or using text messaging or cross-media partnerships to connect more deeply. It draws on user input as the starting point for some coverage.

I had two main aims with this open journalism paper. First, I wanted to put a name on a cultural shift I see happening around journalism – though it’s happening mostly outside the main flow of news. Second, I’ve laid out a case for moving the open idea to the core of how we think about and practice journalism.

As I said earlier, I feel a sense of urgency about this. Part of that comes from the concern we all feel about how to support and sustain independent, fact-based reporting on public affairs. But I’m also impatient for greater change because of all the opportunities still in front of us. My open journalism idea isn’t about saving what went before. It’s about improving journalism for the years ahead.

My friend Howard Weaver, the former news vice president at McClatchy, thinks the biggest change the Internet brought for journalism wasn’t technology itself. It was the end of the gatekeeper role. Yet even though we know that’s true, and we’ve known it for years, we’re just beginning to develop the other roles that make journalism valuable.

I’ve been inspired by many other thinkers, including Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. I helped Bill organize a conference at the end of my Nieman fellowship year on how the internet would affect journalism. This was in 1994, and as Nieman curator, Bill was seeing ahead much farther than most people. Bill and Tom later wrote The Elements of Journalism, an essential book on journalism’s responsibilities to the public. Last year they added a book called Blur, which included some fresh ideas about the functions of journalism in the communication age. Those include familiar roles such as investigator and new ones such as smart aggregator.

In describing the need for newspeople to be more nimble and creative in how they serve consumers, Tom said this to me: “We are caught in an ancient confusion between how we do things and what our function is.”

The work of news has just begun to break old patterns that focus on 20th-century, one-way publishing and broadcasting routines. Social media and networked communication offer a fresh chance at effective two-way exchange. By routinely letting people know that we’re interested in what they know, we change the expectation. By simplifying ways for people to contribute, as Jay Rosen and others suggest, we improve the quality of the contributions. By being more transparent about how quality journalism works, and what it takes to produce it, we can build more support and trust for this work as a public good.

The open journalism ideas I’ve outlined are only some of what’s possible. Once you start thinking this way, the prospects seem limitless. But ideas alone won’t do it. We need to figure out how to break down the processes of journalism to begin with function and then turn to form.

The digital-first idea that’s informing a lot of newsroom reorganizations offers some promise for opening up journalism. For instance, my paper cites several examples of open journalism practices among newsrooms that are part of Journal Register, the company whose mantra is Digital First.

But we have to go beyond building production routines that simply replace a printing press cycle with a multiplatform cycle. We need to build relationship and community connection into the processes of newsgathering and into its starting points. This is key to making journalism less insular and more outwardly focused. That’s why open journalism holds so much promise.

One of the great opportunities of networking is collaboration, which has increased in journalism, with much more promise ahead. More significant is the vast jump in knowledge sharing among journalists. The open-source software movement in journalism connects our work with other disciplines such as science, social sciences and technology – and opens up new possibilities for how we can be relevant and valuable in our communities.

I’m looking forward to hearing Nikki Usher’s remarks on the open-source idea in journalism. But before I close, I want to do two things. First, I want to thank Carola Weil, USC’s director of international and strategic partnerships in Washington, for organizing this event.

Second, I want to issue my own invitation – please join the conversation online. My project is a Future of Journalism effort of The Annenberg Innovation Lab and is built to invite comment and host debate. There’s a handout here with the URL and of course you can find the report easily yourself.

Let’s seize this moment to open journalism – NOW!

I arrived in June at USC Annenberg as executive in residence after 30 years in newspaper and online journalism, the last nine as top editor at The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Sacramento Bee. Since then I’ve been digging into questions that had become increasingly urgent to me as an editor.

They boil down to this: How do we fundamentally change the ways journalism works to serve people better in the digital era? How do we change not just the technology of journalism, but its culture?

In the past, newsrooms defined success in proprietary terms: “owning the story,” or beating the competition. If people wanted to know, they had to come to us — these were our stories, after all. This idea has never really held true. Now it is failing, out of step in a culture that is producing its own information and leans more toward sharing stories than owning them.

Open journalism captures a different mindset, one we’re starting to see in breaking news coverage and web journalism. It says: Everyone owns the story. Let’s all get it right.

Expert journalism is still needed, maybe more than ever, for reporting, verifying, providing context and holding institutions accountable. Yet it’s only part of the picture as people act, individually or collectively, to create ways to generate or share information — new capacity for community knowledge.

I’m wondering how we hook up the wires to power a new idea, one that makes good journalism a joint effort of experts and the public and that supports quality. Open journalism, not a new phrase but still a nascent idea, offers a framework.

I talked recently with Brian Boyer, news apps editor at the Chicago Tribune, who seems like one of the happiest guys in journalism. Boyer is an open-source believer; his team blogs and posts all of its software for others to use. Recently, he ordered T-shirts for his team that say ‘Show Your Work.”

That’s the ethos journalism needs now. But how do we get from “owning the story” to “show your work?”

Journalism isn’t software code, but it is a discipline with standards and techniques that, like code, can be replicated and disseminated. It can be worked on openly, documented and shared, which is where I think the open source idea can be instructive.

We have to remember that news companies didn’t invent journalism and don’t own it. Like the people who named open-source software (not that long ago, in 1998), those who want a public good definition for journalism have a chance to say what that means in a competitive, fragmented marketplace.

Open culture doesn’t mean you don’t compete (transparency and responsiveness are business advantages) or that everything is shared. It can save on costs and spur innovation. Journalism is ripe for it.

This open journalism theory is an idea in progress, one I’d like to test and flesh out. (Below is some background on what I’ve been exploring) What can you add?

I’ll be sharing my conclusions on the USC Annenberg site and hope to offer a compendium of ideas. I’m going for 100, but that too might change.

This week I’ll be at the Online News Association conference in Boston, so if you’re there, look for me. Meantime, please respond via comments to this post (cross-posted at my personal Posterous blog) or via:

Email: melanias@usc.edu

Twitter: melaniesill

G+: Melanie Sill

***

Background: Here’s some of the territory I’ve been exploring:

The news discussion right now dwells heavily on distribution: platforms, channels, apps. I’m focusing on the labor-intensive work of original reporting on public affairs, particularly at the state and local level. That’s where news company contraction has left major holes. That gap also is where we have opportunity, in a changing marketplace, to advance a different kind of journalism.

A few influential people have outlined ideas for open journalism, yet so far no definition has stuck. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, has used the term open-source journalism and proved that transparency doesn’t impede competitive success. Media critics have argued via books and blogs for practices that redefine the relationship between people who do journalism and those who contribute to it and use it.

Outside the news business, people are working on community issues and information gaps in new ways. I’ve been following a Stanford student-led nonprofit called California Common Sense and its government “transparency data portal,” launched over the summer. CACs.org didn’t replace something that used to be done by newspapers or television. Instead, its corps of student programmers and analysts built a new web site that draws in government spending data of all sorts, presents it visually and invites users to scrutinize it. The site quickly caused a stir and plans to expand.

In Vermont, a restricted-access neighborhood site called Front Porch Forum has created authentic information exchange among people who live near one another, also engaging local elected officials. Its founder, Michael Wood-Lewis, says he’s not replicating journalism but “growing audience for local journalism.”

And as Hurricane Irene approached the East Coast, I was watching the nonprofit Crisis Commons site line up volunteers online to build a wiki-type information resource, which seemed to attract little notice from major news sites. From my sideline seat I wondered how journalists and entities such as Crisis Commons could work together more effectively in such situations.

These are just a few of a fast-multiplying number of groups being formed to provide information or work on community issues, mostly online, in new ways. They are resources for improving journalism, doing things media haven’t really done before, yet seem mostly untapped so far even as publishers have less to spend on original reporting.

It’s hard to talk about what’s hopeful in journalism without addressing what’s worrisome — the rapid decline in the numbers of journalists doing original reporting at the state and local level, the financial precariousness of both new and old media. Almost everyone running a newsroom of any size or funding source has some question about how long the money will last.

Yet open culture is a business principle of our times involving transparency, responsiveness and a focus on end users (citizens, readers, viewers). Journalism needs those ideas to be valuable and relevant. It needs open-source tools to reduce costs, collaboration to build capacity and two-way communication with audiences to inform strategy and tactics.

A framework for open journalism has emerged over the past few years, particularly in the way web culture and tools have opened up knowledge sharing. Along with organized efforts, countless peer-to-peer touches occur across blogs, Twitter and at meetups and conferences. Journalism has back channels where people are help each other sort out technically challenging work. Some are new, some aren’t: for instance, the NICAR-L listserv at Investigative Reporters and Editors, where journalists help each other every day on working with data and using new tools.

Hacker-journalists are joining newsrooms (developer jobs are among the hottest in the industry) and bringing new ideas, skills and attitudes into the mix. They’re connecting with a broader data explosion online that’s connecting journalism with science, government and others who’re turning numbers into stories and meaning.

Universities, foundations and philanthropy are active players in creating acts of journalism now along with learning and experimentation. Startup newsrooms, grant-funded enterprises and other new branches of journalism are helping each and are developing partnerships with new and old media. Professional organizations and journalism think tanks have amped up training. And collaboration is happening in some of the most territorial work of journalism, investigative reporting.

Journalism is opening up.

Yet much of this is occurring outside journalism proper, and many people I speak with see scant progress in mainstream news. The knowledge-sharing among journalists isn’t reaching beyond them to other communicators and users.

I think we’re still missing many chances, partly because we need to work on more systemic approaches to reinventing journalism relationships.

Here’s an example of one such system: American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, a system of signing up members and tapping their experience through email and web postings. The network has grown to include 120,000 registered sources tapped by 45 news partners in commercial and nonprofit media. Through the network, now expanding, journalists can solicit people’s knowledge to directly inform and improve reporting.

The idea of tapping into people’s experience is hard to debate; lacking systems to do it, resource-strapped newsrooms often don’t.

What’s the next breakthrough? What systems and frameworks does open journalism need to succeed not just as a concept, but as a new set of practices supported by people because they find them valuable?

While her book focuses on print weeklies, Muller’s subject matter is just as relevant for the growing number of online editors and independent publishers working to serve neighborhoods and towns — what’s now called hyperlocal news.

“Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns” takes us off the main highway — not just geographically, but away from the big-media conversation that dominates journalism discussion these days. And like physical journeys to new places, this one rewards us with insight and appreciation — for the sometimes-heroic, sometimes-flawed, always influential small-town news people and for Muller, our enthusiastic and honest tour guide.

Muller, a veteran television and radio journalist and associate professor at USC Annenberg, is a fan of these papers. She announces right away that journalism is “alive and kicking in small towns all across America thanks to the editors of weekly newspapers who, for very little money and a fair amount of aggravation, keep on telling it like it is.” Some 8,000 weeklies operate in the U.S., she reports, and “most of them are doing quite well,” with less disruption from Internet competition so far than national and metro dailies.

Whether or not that will last, the core of “Emus” isn’t about a publishing platform, it’s about the role local journalism and the people who produce it play in small towns and rural communities across America.

Online editor/publishers who have taken on the job of informing local communities might harvest many lessons from the rich traditions of weekly newspapers: How do you report on conflict as well as community events? How do you handle stories of high interest but intensely intimate subject matter, especially when someone begs you not to publish their name? What makes it fun?

Being journalistically honest in a community takes courage, which Muller details in stories of steel-spined leaders such as W. Horace Carter, whose Tabor City Tribune in North Carolina campaigned against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s. Carter persisted in the face of death threats, eventually turning the tide of local opinion, helping bring prosecution of dozens of Klansmen and sharing the first Pulitzer Prize (with the Washington, N.C., News Reporter) ever awarded to a weekly paper. She features several others equally admirable for gutsy, unwavering willingness to expose local corruption.

Muller also recognizes the everyday heroism that will resonate, too, with online community editors who are writing, editing, posting photos and videos, selling ads and going to community events. Publishing through good times and hard times takes constancy, which she describes in editor/owners who rarely vacation, do most jobs themselves and who sometimes are just one or two advertising accounts away from losing money.

While she doesn’t dig deep into the flaws and harm that less-ethical community papers can bring, Muller doesn’t ignore the rough edges of these institutions. With a keen eye and a light hand, she traces the complex journalism story behind a conflict in eastern Montana that got national coverage when the town of Hardin offered to house prisoners from Guantanamo Bay at a new detention facility that was unoccupied. One of the players was a seasoned daily journalist, newly arrived as editor of one of three community papers, who ended up crosswise not just with local political leaders but also his own colleagues.

Who was right? Muller lets you decide, but she shares her own questions in untangling the ego conflicts, viewpoint clashes and competing alliances in this case, a classic illustration of how personal community journalism can be to those who practice it and those who read it.

“Emus” explores the lighter side, too — the eternal appeal of funny police blotter items, the unapologetic styles of curmudgeonly editors and the tactful omissions of the local obituary. Behind all this, Muller shows us, is journalism informed heavily by geographic proximity — not the view from nowhere, but the view from where the community lives.

She mentions “Harold Starr of the Herald-Star,” the fictional small town weekly editor in Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” and his motto: “I have to live here, too, you know.” Muller’s book, however, is better than fiction because it is deeply, richly reported.

The author visited many of her subjects personally and interviewed townfolk, other journalists and multiple sources to tell each paper’s story. Her characters are flesh and bone, real people, the kind of people many of us would like to know.

Like oh-so-many other journalists, I started my professional career at a small-town paper and learned how influential a local editor and publisher could be in a tiny community. I took pictures of a tomato that resembled Abraham Lincoln, rode around all night with local sheriff’s deputies and suffered when a story I wrote, featuring a rape victim who wanted her story told, was killed by an editor. With two daily journalism internships under my belt, I was certain the paper was wrong. In reading Muller’s book, I’m reminded that such decisions aren’t simple.

“Emus” demonstrates that the best local journalism begins with community connection and knowledge — not just with a dateline — and is heavily dependent on those who lead it. No matter what the platform, journalism at this level can serve communities powerfully or fail them significantly. Muller makes us glad for the “hyperlocal” stalwarts who do things right.

“Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns,”246 pages, University of Nebraska Press.

Cohen now is Knight Professor of the Practice at Duke University and director of the university’s new Reporter’s Lab, which aims to be a central resource for developing and sharing technology to improve and simplify the hands-on work of public-affairs reporting. The lab plans to make its software and other resources available to anyone who wants them.

In a recent chat, Cohen told me the project aims to bring technology innovation to in-depth reporting, which she thinks has been left behind even as digital tools have transformed how news is organized and consumed.

Here’s how she put it in a May 16 blog post introducing the Reporter’s Lab:

“For professional and pro-am journalists who specialize in public affairs, the technological revolution passed them by sometime in the early millennium,” continuing that the lab aims “to do for modern reporting what photocopiers did in the 1970s, and e-mail, the Web, spreadsheets and databases did in the 1990s. It will go beyond the hype to test, create, commission or apply new methods to make the hard work of original reporting easier or more effective.”

Cohen’s work also attacks the central question facing accountability reporting, especially the highly valued variety that requires significant time and labor: How do we continue to afford it?

“What I’m looking at is how do we reduce the cost of original reporting without losing anything,” Cohen said

The Reporter’s Lab, which is part of Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Public Policy and related to the center’s computational journalism initiative, has several related goals focused on acting as a central resource for innovation and advances in the core work of in-depth journalism.

“I spent about a year interviewing reporters, editors, technologists, online folks, academic researchers, actual computer scientists, about 100 of them altogether, about what’s needed versus what’s possible using today’s technology,” Cohen said.

She also drew on her own deep experience: 20 years of reporting and editing mostly focused on computer-assisted journalism, including 10 years at the Post.

In a summary describing the lab, formally known as the Duke Project for the Advancement of Public Affairs Reporting, Cohen wrote that analysis of 15 boxes of handwritten forms and other documents for “The District’s Lost Children” series (for which she shared the 2002 investigative Pulitzer) took six months.

“Electronic tools that would have made those documents searchable, extracted the little precise information that was not censored and grouped the recommendations might have cut that effort by a third,” she wrote. “If the analysis were easier more reporters in other cities might have tackled similar projects.”

Part of the lab’s work will be in building, adapting or testing tools for depth reporting. For instance, the lab created a tool called TimeFlow (for reporters to use organizing material on long-running stories), which has been downloaded 1,500 times.

The lab recently hired Charlie Szymanski, app developer and visualization pro. Szymanski worked previously at the National Journal and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where his portfolio includes a Knight-Batten Innovation Award winner and impressive work for the paper’s series on fraud in real-estate “flipping.”

Cohen plans to work with Investigative Reporters and Editors to develop a “test kitchen” approach involving the lab’s tools and technology from other sources.

“I think there’s a great need for this,” said Mark Horvit, IRE executive director. There’s no lack of new tools being used and touted, he said, but even the open ongoing exchange at the NICAR-L listserv for computer-assisted journalism sometimes becomes overwhelming with the range of recommendations.

“It’s very hard to keep up with all of that — it’s very hard to know what tools are best for your needs,” he said.

Additionally, as Cohen notes in her project summary, tools for web-scraping, indexing material or doing other key tasks in simpler ways often are too expensive or technologically daunting to be used effectively or broadly by many reporters — especially on deadline.

Cohen plans to build testing and training into the lab and noted that thanks to Duke’s support, “everything that’s being done here is open source and free.”

The first was a post on the ProPublica website Monday offering a “step by step guide” and searchable database for anyone tracing the influence of a nonprofit organization called ALEC that has proven highly effective in developing “model bills” for state legislatures.

The second was a conference call Tuesday that drew about 140 people to hear about using ProPublica-built data and a news application for reporting on education access issues in local schools and districts.

ProPublica published a national story based on the data, examining the relationship of poverty to educational access, along with a Facebook-integrated app for looking up and comparing schools and districts.

These two efforts are moves in the right direction not just for ProPublica but for journalism and the public. By sharing data and making it easy to use, ProPublica produces more value from its deep investments of time and expertise. ProPublica can also benefit from the insights and experiences of others who share or report on the data.

During the conference call, reporter Sharona Coutts, news application developer Al Shaw and computer-assisted reporting director Jennifer LaFleur heard questions, comments and suggestions. Reporters, whose affiliations included both traditional and startup news organizations, also poked and prodded at some of the findings.

As anyone who’s worked with databases knows, data analysis tends to prompt as many questions as it answers. The ProPublica team explained what they’d done to clean up and amplify two major sets of federal data and encouraged reporters to add their knowledge and mash up the new data with other sources. ProPublica also emailed followup links later to those on the call.

This kind of nitty-gritty, story-specific journalism discussion has generally occurred mainly among a limited subset of journalists through specialized skills organizations (such as Investigative Reporters and Editors), in training seminars or in members-only settings. ProPublica’s model shows the promise of opening up that discussion much more broadly — not just among journalists, but for public view of how journalism is done.

Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager, told me that transparency and public engagement have been part of the core discussion at ProPublica since its launch in 2008. In the past year ProPublica has accelerated its social media push, growing Twitter followers by more than five times (55,883 as of this morning) and Facebook friends by more than three times (20,280).

ProPublica has as much competitive DNA as any news organization. Yet Tofel and Editor in Chief Paul Steiger note that their decisions to share databases and expertise don’t have to pass muster with corporate owners or stockholders.

Last year, a ProPublica collaboration with several other news organizations on a project called “Dollars for Docs,” showing pharmaceutical company payments to physicians, expanded its impact after the initial series by sharing and inviting further use of ProPublica’s data. Eventually, dozens of print, online and broadcast outlets drew on the database to produce stories. ProPublica’s “tools and data” page shows other examples.

Given ProPublica’s mission to “make change,” Tofel said, anything that extends the organization’s reach is worth trying.

“That tends to drive us toward open source and it tends to drive us toward sharing,” Tofel said, “and it tends to drive us toward wanting people to follow up on our stuff.”

ProPublica benefits from such followup as its work is credited broadly and its databases and stories are linked off other sites. Social media efforts like the #muckreads feature launched recently (Tweet stories using the #muckreads hashtag and ProPublica considers and aggregates on its site), along with news apps and story links, can help boost traffic to the ProPublica site, now at about 300,000 monthly unique visitors and 1 million monthly page views.

The Web, of course, offers many resources for learning about journalism. Poynter has greatly expanded its online training and knowledge-sharing, through blogs and the News University curriculum, and numerous journalism/media blogs publish spot reports, opinion pieces and guidance that fuel shared learning. Foundation and university-led institutes and websites keep up a steady stream of conversation about ideas and practices. And professional organizations play varying roles in learning for members, with IRE standing out as a leader.

ProPublica adds a new dimension as a news organization sharing its resources directly.

The Web and social media channels also are rich in open discussion and knowledge sharing about some aspects of news and information online — data analysis and visualization, use of social media, new tools and technology. Tech culture is intersecting more and more with journalism, and journalism can gain much more from that influence than new gadgets for old ideas.

Journalism researchers Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis explored this idea in an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog examining how open-source themes emerged in the learning lab portion of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. (I wrote here earlier about the partnership, known as “Mojo.”)

“What can open source teach journalism,” Usher and Lewis asked, “and journalism open source?”

Their findings outline ways the authors think some of the ideas of open-source software align, or don’t, with journalism: transparency, iteration, standards and collaboration. The Mojo experiment should be a good test of cross-pollination.

I’d like to hear about and share other examples of open sharing of resources that enable public-affairs news and information. Please post examples in comments here or email me using the link above. I’ll report back here.

A kind of online summer school, the Mojo Learning Lab is running webinars, discussion, reference pointers and coaching for more than 60 people — those who made the first cut in a process that’s part contest, part collaboration and large part public experiment.

While not alone in trying to harness tech innovation for better news and information flow, the Mojo effort has drawn several hundred idea pitches — for better online discourse and storytelling, better tagging and linking of parts of video and other improvements — that touch on both the problems of current formats and the opportunities of evolving Web tools.

The $2.5 million project is a joint effort of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. It aims to “embed” 15 people and projects in partner organizations over the next three years. This year’s selection process began with a broad call for ides and meetups around the Web and in several countries and will continue with 20 participants being picked for a two-week “hackfest” in Berlin this fall before five finalists are selected.

Mojo is interesting not just for what it wants to do — connect Web innovation with journalism needs — but also for the way it’s trying to do it.

Instead of spinning winning ideas and their authors off with some prize money, the partnership hopes to develop them in working news operations. The 2012 partners: Al Jazeera English, the BBC,the Boston Globe, the Guardian and Zeit Online.

Organizers also promise, and are hammering home to participants, that winning projects must be built using open Web standards so they can be broadly used for greater impact. The program website describes a process that will train participants to turn concepts into code and offer publicly available demos and reference materials.

Anyone can follow along at the Learning Lab and project website, or via Twitter at #MozNewsLab.

Spreading “lessons of the Web”

All that can sound a little abstract, but a lecture the other day by London based “international developer evangelist” Christian Heilmann of Mozilla connected some of the dots. Heilmann’s focus was on programming standards, particularly regarding HTML5, but his illustrations focused on making news and information on the web easier, simpler and more elegant — both for people who create material and for people who use it, no matter the device, browser or screen type.

Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman,who stopped by the lecture to introduce Heilmann, told participants the Mojo partnership aligns with the foundation’s decision to reach beyond its signature Firefox Web browser to other projects “in particular places where we feel like the future of the Web is going to be shaped.”

“Journalism and media is one of these places,” Surman said. Mozilla, he said, has two main interests, “One, that the lessons of the Web and how organizations like Mozilla operate are things that media can tap into,” and second that new tools and services are based on common standards, including HTML5.

Both Knight and Mozilla hope the Mojo project, beyond the software it produces, can act as an accelerant to the frustratingly slow movement of innovation into the core of news culture.

In a recent interview, Jose Zamora, journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation, referred several times to “bridging the gap” between innovation and organizations with significant news capacity and audiences.

He noted that Knight has committed $27.1 million in the past five years to the Knight News Challenge, a contest-based grant program aimed at jump-starting media innovation, funding 76 projects from 12,000 applications.

Zamora said the Mojo partnership is a different approach with similar goals to the news challenge, aiming to pull ideas and skills of programmers, Web designers, artists and other disciplines into thinking about news and information.

“The environment is changing so fast and it’s constantly moving, that we don’t even know exactly what we looking for,” he said. “It’s probably things that we haven’t even imagined.”

To that end, Zamora said, Mojo reached out worldwide and to many disciplines outside journalism to solicit applicants, few of whom came from traditional news backgrounds.

“In the first round it will be more about technology, but it’s about trying to bridge a divide and create a different culture,” Zamora said.

Mojo’s supporting foundations joined forces after Surman met Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, and recognized “a kindred spirit” in terms of civic aspirations and interests in finding ways to accelerate technology innovation in journalism and news.

The two organizations share a commitment to information as part of civic life and want to “build stuff, not just talk about stuff,” Surman says. As he and the Knight leadership talked, Surman said, he also attracted by the “subversive idea of really getting inside big media organizations and playing inside.”

Can “open” ideal come true?

Yet Mojo has built some large challenges into its plans. The first is trying to stimulate both competition and collaboration — and open prototyping — at a time when ideas for apps and solutions crowd the marketplace.

“Figuring out the balance between contest and collaboration is both intentional and not easy,” Surman said.

Another tall order is Mojo’s promise to make outcomes open to anyone who wants them, an ideal that has not proved out with some Knight News Challenge projects.

“Nobody’s good at taking iterative inventions that are interwoven with something bigger and pushing them back into the world,” Surman said. Mojo’s paid fellows will be working in news organizations with their own content management systems, he noted.

“We won’t know till we get there what it means to do it in the open usefully in ways that others can pick up and run with it,” he said.

Along the way, Mojo’s champions hope to link like-minded people: news and information experts, programmers, designers, videographers and others who want to build better tools for creating and consuming news — and who’ll do so using open platforms and collaboration.

“We want to create a bit of a school of thought around these changes,” said Phillip Smith, a Toronto-based digital publishing consultant leading Mojo’s operational process.

Smith said he talked to dozens of journalists, journalism educators and newsroom programmers before putting out calls for ideas. The other day he blogged an invitation for journalists to lob their suggestions into the Mojo process. He also has posted at PBS MediaShift about Mojo.

The Mojo participants trend more heavily toward code than newsgathering, but offer a notable mix of interests, backgrounds and information passions.

Chris Keller, who’d worked in print and online roles in newspapers before joining madison.com to work on audience development, is hoping to develop better topical pages for news issues. Corbin Smith, 23-year-old working on his graduate thesis in Toronto, pitched his idea for a “kind of fact-checking and narrative building platform” that would be associated with a user rather than a web site.

Dan Whaley, a San Francisco entrepreneur who’s founded and sold one major dot-com company and is involved with several nonprofit ventures, was drawn in by a Mojo challenge inviting proposals for taking online discourse “beyond the comment thread.”

“This to me is mankind’s biggest problem, is how do we understand what’s credible?” Whaley said. “In order to figure that out, we have to have a feedback channel that works.”

Whaley submitted the outline for Hypothes.is, which he described in the pitch as a platform that “will enable sentence-level (i.e. annotation, or “atomic” commenting) critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review.”

Whaley’s bio notes that he wrote the original code and cofounded the online travel reservations company GetThere.com, which Sabre/Travelocity bought in 2000 for a widely reported price of $750 million. Hypothes.is isn’t dependent on the Mojo process, but Whaley said he was impressed by the participants and enjoying discussing his ideas with like-minded people.

“This challenge is kind of like the hashtag for people who are interested in solving this problem,” Whaley said. “In that way it’s attracting people like myself with a wide set of backgrounds.”

Does Web innovation need foundations?

Mojo organizers say they’ve heard some complaints and criticism, mostly in email and project comments. There were questions about whether technology innovation could happen in newsrooms at all. Some newsrooms questioned the selection of the first five partners — operations that seemed to have a leg up already on Web innovation.

There are practical concerns, too. Most legacy news organizations run on closed or proprietary content management systems, built for print or broadcast, that don’t afford easy integration with new technology. Incoming Mozilla journalism leader Daniel Sinker, who will take over Mojo’s leadership, noted that some newsrooms have found ways to work around such obstacles — implementing new features at the front end of systems rather than the back end, for instance, or building apps that work outside the CMS.

“Most limitations around CMS are cultural limitations,” Sinker said.

Others wondered why there was a need at all for a Mojo project, given the seemingly infinite supply of ideas, new tools and startup ventures for online information.

Zamora, however, said Knight sees gaps that the marketplace isn’t filling and a need — as a foundation focused on journalism’s changing role in the digital era — to actively promote news and media innovation. He also emphasized the impact that could come with working through Mozilla, an organization that’s “of the Web, not just on the Web.”

Despite all the players competing on Web technology, Zamora added, few take an open approach that “allows everyone to use services or products… or to learn from their projects, successes or failures.”

Success, he said, will be measured not just by the news partnerships and new products themselves but by whether Mojo succeeds in creating ripples that carry out many circles beyond its core.

“I think one of the main things would be to create this new culture of news organizations being more proactive and more open to constant changing on the Web,” Zamora said.

At Mozilla, Surman also hopes that Mojo’s ideas infect newsrooms. Mojo’s circle of influence seems modest so far – voting was light on the idea pitches and only 24 nonparticipants were following the Learning Lab early this week, according to the web site counter. Surman wants more “community-building” — and more impact.

At the end of a year success would show up not just in the newsroom projects but in relationship building among participants, the broader Web community and among the news partners and their business structures, he said.

He hopes the Mojo project will lead newsrooms to hire more people like those chosen for fellowships “to work on projects like the projects we introduce,” Surman said, describing “a cultural transformation piece, where decisions are being made.”