Comments on: Seeking help on an idea in progress: Can open journalism work?

By: Melanie Sill

Melanie Sill — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:33:11 +0000

Hello. What you describe (though I don’t know the particulars) doesn’t fall within what I’d consider open journalism. Ethics are ethics.

Aggregation is one area where more transparency and development of standards would help. People are doing it many ways, both new sites and old media.

Collaborations can help build capacity and quality, but I think as people have gained experience it’s becoming clear there need to be clear expectations and a spelling out of what parties contribute or gain.

The “rewriting without credit” is a longtime complaint in local reporting, so it helps to have specifics.

By: 216.160.45.150

216.160.45.150 — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:05:28 +0000

Does this “open journalism” mean that paid media outlets will now start paying unpaid bloggers for all the original reporting they steal from them without credit? I used to be able to get paid for my freelance writing. Now, media outlets won’t buy it–they just steal it outright or rewrite it and run it as their own. This “open journalism” concept seems to be a way of legitimizing that theft with nothing in it for unpaid bloggers–many of whom, like myself, are professional journalists who are doing far more original reporting than most paid journalists.