The Annenberg Innovation Lab has published "The Case for Open Journalism Now: A new framework for informing communities," my online discussion paper on the emerging idea of open journalism.

The web paper (which can be downloaded as  PDF) includes dozens of links to open journalism in action and draws on thinking, writing and actions by people across journalism, including bloggers and nonprofit newsrooms along with print, broadcast and online journalists. It resulted from my work during the fall semester as Journalism Executive in Residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism in Los Angeles. Along with Nikki B. Usher, assistant professor of journalism at George Washington University and a recent Annenberg Ph.d., I gave a talk at the National Press Club on Dec. 12 on open journalism and open source influence in journalism.

My biggest challenge has been extending the conversations that enriched the reporting for this paper into an online forum. I hope you'll read and weigh in using the online response form or via email. There's plenty to debate, and you might disagree with my conclusions, but certainly those who consider journalism a public good have reason to consider the arguments from me and others included in this paper.

If you want evidence that open source thinking helps journalism look at what's been happening in London during the Mozilla Festival 2011 as some 55 contributors have developed a draft of a new handbook aimed to be a "utility belt for data journalists." Here's a presentation on the handbook on the festival website.

The festival, "Media, Freedom and the Web," was held over the weekend at Ravensbourne College in London. Search #mozfest and #mozilla to catch up on social media. I'm not there but have been keeping up through digital updates.

Here's a post from journalism.co.uk on the first draft of the handbook, due out this week. The project is being led by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Even for those who aren't there, which is most of us, the festival is spinning off lots of learning. Maybe we should stop having journalism conferences and start having festivals where we make things that move everybody forward.

The handbook reflects the important and growing influence of "hacker-journalists" in expanding journalism capacity and reach with better software and technology approaches, especially for mining and presenting data analysis. Here's a Storify version of the #ASNEChat I cohosted on Twitter last week with key players from ProPublica, the NYT, IRE, Duke University and the Chicago Tribune.

I'm finishing up my paper at USC Annenberg on a related but broader idea of open journalism, which also has a U.K. connection through Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who uses the phrase to describe his newsroom's approach to news on the web.

Plans are being made for an open journalism/open source presentation in Washington in December by me and a recent USC Annenberg Ph.D., Nikki Usher, now an assistant professor at George Washington University, who is working with Seth C. Lewis of the University of Minnesota on research into open source software and "maker culture" influence on journalism.

I’m looking for help in addressing a puzzle and exploring a promising idea called open journalism.

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 Online Journalism Review 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 and connection, 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?

For those who've asked me to share such information: You can keep up with some of my work through this Online Journalism Review blog and occasional writing for other online publications, including a piece for the Knight Digital Media Center's News Leadership 3.0 blog.

Starting next Tuesday (Aug. 30) I'll be cohosting a weekly Twitter chat for ASNE with Carole Tarrant of the Roanoke Times in Virginia. The chat aims to help the organization make new connections while broadening its digital discussion of leadership, the First Amendment, diversity and other journalism values. It'll also bring ideas into ASNE and ASNE members more actively into the online journalism discussion.

This Tuesday afternoon, of course, you can guess where I'll be: At the Innovation Lab open house with others who want to move fast, break things and fail harder. Given my newbie status running a Twitter chat, (see above) guess I might have a chance to try that last one.

Wish me luck. Better yet, join the chat, tweet back and suggest topics and guests. It'll be like an open house without the food and wine. With luck, and participation, it'll also be fun.

Hashtag #ASNEchat -- please join, Tuesdays at 9 Pacific/Noon Eastern.

Reaction over the past few days to the U.S. government's handling of budget policy -- the ping-ponging of actions and responses among big financial players and markets worldwide -- reminds me of an excellent book called Overconnected that explored the causes and effects of contagion in our 24/7 information era.

The author is Bill Davidow, former executive at Intel, Hewlett-Packard and General Electric, venture investor and author of other books including The Virtual Corporation.

Overconnected, released in January, shares the evolution of Davidow's view of the Internet's role -- he sets out as an enthusiast, begins to believe that "overconnectedness" is causing damaging contagion regarding certain kinds of both negative and positive feedback, and eventually concludes that managing information in the digital era calls for new systems that provide stops and brakes against panics and contagion.

Davidow wrote a piece for Forbes online last month headlined, "Will the Internet Take Down the Euro?"

Here's the link to the book website and part of the publisher's summary.

In Overconnected, Davidow meticulously — and counter-intuitively — anatomizes how overconnectivity can create systems with excessive amounts of positive feedback, making those systems extremely volatile, accident prone, and subject to contagion. Davidow explains how the Internet – and the overconnectivity it gave rise to — played a starring role in the collapse of the Icelandic economy, our loss of privacy, and the spectacular real estate and financial market crash of 2008.

I haven't seen Davidow quoted anywhere in the past few days in the major outlet coverage I've been reading, but I'm hoping someone digs in to assess how information flow and action are related. In this case, it's all information -- a downgrade based on analysis of politics and numbers, investment decisions based on downgrade and economic data.

And given the tendency of media to cover stock markets like sporting events in such situations -- it's an economic story that can be boiled down to the simplest terms, up or down -- how do you separate reality from perception?

This was my laptop screen this morning — the last day of a four-week online "Learning Lab" that connected a lively and creative bunch of people who want to improve how journalism works online.

The lab is part of a competition/collaboration called the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership — nicknamed "Mojo" — that I wrote about for OJR a couple of weeks ago. Briefly, about 60 people were picked to participate directly in the Learning Lab and develop ideas from the journalism or technology side -- that group will be narrowed to 20 for the next step, a Berlin "hackfest" in the fall, and then to five finalists who will work in major newsrooms in 2012.

I was drawn into Mojo a few months ago, when I was still editor of The Sacramento Bee, by an irresistible post asking for people who wanted to improve online commenting. Hell yes, I thought. The Bee reached out to try to be an initial partner, but didn't make the list picked by the Knight and Mozilla foundations for the first round.

I decided to catch up with Mojo once I arrived at USC Annenberg as a visiting professional. I'm exploring how journalism culture is changing as it operates increasingly in a digital environment, and aside from agreeing with some of the project's aims, I find it addresses issues in journalism that are more profound than a simple lack of the right tools.

The most ambitious, and iffy, aspiration of Mojo is helping push journalism culture and Web practice more toward the best of open source thinking — which involves discipline, standards and methodology as much as a spirit of collaboration. Here's a good piece from Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis posted to Nieman Labs the other day exploring the ways open-source software ideas might or might not work for journalism.

(Unfortunately, one of the disappointments of organizers was the lack of response from journalists to several public calls for input. Here's one such call Phillip Smith blogged recently — he called it a "message in a bottle," so maybe someone will find it eventually and weigh in.)

Through the summer I've sat in on most of the Mojo learning lab lectures (which featured brilliant people from Web design, software development and new media and concluded with Jeff Jarvis, who's in his own category) and kept up with participant blogs. Mojo's organizers, with help with some tools that seemed better than average, impressed me by offering substance, fun and a lot of friendly whip-cracking about deadlines and homework.

My web cam took the day off for this morning's group session, a fail that hadn't happened before. But I enjoyed seeing all the faces, hearing the voices even contributing to the group jam at the end, which I am unable to describe fully, only to say that it was... unique.

It'll be fun to see how Mojo progresses and what happens with the dozens of ideas that have been incubated through the process, whether or not they make the final cut this year.

If you're curious, check out the Learning Lab base page or the Mojo Drumbeat home page, or the #MozNewsLab Twitter feed.

Bob Calo, an accomplished broadcast producer and UC Berkeley senior lecturer, got me thinking with this recent Shorenstein Center "discussion paper"  arguing that the loss of trust between the public and the press began long before the Internet and involves a vast gulf that opened in the last half-century between a journalism "establishment" and ordinary Americans.

The paper, which he wrote as a Shorenstein fellow at Harvard, takes its title from Calo's comparisons between the establishment-vs-vernacular debate in architecture and what he sees as similar patterns in journalism's relationship with the broader American culture.

He writes that "at the core of contemporary disengagement is a problem of translation. The establishment press speaks one language, its vernacular clients, or readers and viewers, another."

Calo has deep experience in broadcast, documentary and video journalism (for networks, KQED and PBS) and acknowledges that his view of newspapers is from the outside. His anecdotes are drawn from his own experience in that part of journalism. Yet he argues persuasively, quoting historian and social critic Chrisopher Lasch, drawing on the work of writer J.B. Jackson and revisiting Walter Lippmann with a skeptical eye.

For instance, he traces the post-Watergate period and sees journalism's rise as much different story than the heroic narrative many of us grew up on:

"It’s at this point where journalism, until then running roughly parallel to American middle-class aspirations, begins to take a divergent and ultimately costly path. After the Nixon resignation, it ascends to a position of power, gains a seat at the table, becomes a player in an ideological battle for the American soul. It gets its hands on the levers of power, begins to attract people who want their hands on the levers of power. And it begins to talk to itself, finding validation from within, embracing Lippmann’s dispassionate skepticism, as well as his mistrust of the public to develop its opinions in a scientific manner. It finds politics a charade, so increasingly it portrays it that way; it has little in common with the working class, so it ignores it; it has little interest in stories of inspiration and hope, and it ceases to cover them; it’s uncomfortable about religion and faith, and pretends they do not exist. As the nation became more (or perhaps returned to) the vernacular, journalism became more a part of the “establishment”; as the nation became more diverse, both racially and ideologically, journalism did neither; as the audience came to doubt “objectivity,” journalism doubled down."

I talked to Calo recently. He sees solutions, or at least better ways to do journalism, and outlines them in the paper. He's still eager to try new ideas, it's clear, as he co-directs the video storytelling and reporting program in the graduate journalism school at Berkeley.

As part of his job he is executive editor for RIchmond Confidential, one of three foundation-funded experiments being run by Berkeley's journalism program. As he wrote recently in Nieman Reports, the student work taught him about connecting with community - by covering high school football, not city politics.

Calo's fellowship is over and he's back at work in the Bay Area, but this discussion paper seems worth -- well -- discussion, debate, and definitely consideration by those of us who believe that journalism doesn't work unless it connects with the people it serves.

Calo says he's hearing from people in his online network who liked his argument and want to know "what do we do about it."

"My hope is that it’ll just circulate a bit and maybe start a conversation," he said.

Meantime, he has a favorite idea that I find kind of irresistible. He wants to start a news bar, like a sports bar, where people come to watch news together -- to connect not just with events, but with each other.

"In some kind of twisted way I like this idea because it’s speaking more toward the role … that we used to cherish," he said.

"In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses."

-- From "McLuhanisms," on the official Marshall McLuhan website.

I've been fascinated by an 1969 Nieman reports essay on Marshall McLuhan by the late Sylvan Meyer, then editor of the Miami News, titled "I Think Mr. McLuhan Is Trying to Tell us Something."

Meyer, former editor of the Gainesville, Ga., Times, wrote the piece as a memo to his publisher. Dear Boss, he wrote, and went on to assess, puzzle over and critique McLuhan's writings on media. Nieman Journalism Labs unearthed the essay as part of coverage marking what would have been McLuhan's 100th birthday on July 21.

What dazzles me is how completely Meyer seemed to grasp newspapers' role and weaknesses, though he had fun rejecting some of McLuhan's premises and pointedly noting that the author was offering no practical suggestions that would help an editor who came to work "of a morning."

Reading the piece, which also offers a prescient understanding of both the value and the vulnerability of classified advertising, I had to wonder: What if Meyer had acted on some of the McLuhan ideas he clearly recognized as valid instead of deftly defusing their power?

A few exerpts:

It has been an article of faith with us that we want to help our readers feel they are conscious participants in this society. To be participants, they must understand what is going on around them, what affects them and how. We have proceeded, also, since we are a community newspaper, on the belief that our reader's initial relationship with his environment is his family, his church and his local community. We can be content that no other medium is supplying him so fully with the stuff of home. In-depth reporting, aggressive coverage of his government, enterprise in seeking out stories on the groundswells and on the surface, all are there. Are we getting through to him or are we just spreading it on him? McLuhan raises this question again and again, even as we have in our interminable self-analyses and at those endless seminars where everybody usually gives up and gets drunk.

*** 

One of McLuhan's purposes is to explain how impressions and information penetrate that mind. He explains that messages either seep in or are implanted in the mind through the whole culture the guy swims in. The message lodges through all the senses, singly and in combination, aware and subconscious. The audience, including us, controls some sources of sensation and information and operates others by instinct, as a tick jumps toward a warm dog. How we handle ideas and information results from the sum of our history, culminating in us.

This hardly tells us what to put in the paper tomorrow. It may explain why newspaper people haven't tried to figure out what it is McLuhan is trying to tell us. The literati, our critics, have known all along that we are venal and inept, not to say common. They seem to find a great deal in McLuhan's work that reinforces their understanding of society and that also helps them identify what is wrong with newspapers. I do not think McLuhan is speaking only to them and not to us because we are a medium, an orthodox, recognized one, not a mystic force as are some of his other media.

It should work out, then, that if McLuhan has the ungarbled skinny, as they used to say when news papering was romantic, proper interpretation of his testaments should give us some clues to improvement. I do not mean clues in the sense of heightened understanding of the milieu or sharpened sensitivities to all human interrelationships as they are affected by electricity, LSD, or the evolution of the wheel. I mean hardware, such as more compelling ways to use pictures, better ideas for content, layouts that sock it to 'em, type displays that demand readership, and like that. I mean the stuff that will not only sell more newspapers but get them read in the bargain, and that last is the tough part.

Still is.

These Stanford students aren't the usual suspects heard complaining — often to little end — about California's vastly uneven system of keeping and providing online access to public records. Yet they're asking the same question I've heard journalists, academics, open-government advocates and others voice since I arrived in the Golden State a few years ago: How can a state that's home to Silicon Valley offer citizens such poor online access to information on government performance?

Turned down on its request for one year's information on all state spending, the new nonprofit group California Common Sense — founded and led by current and former Stanford students — blasted the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown today with a righteous indignation that I find refreshing. Here's a press release quote from Dakin Sloss, president of CACS:

"Either Governor Brown's office lacks the competence required to release the state's checkbook or they are unwilling to do so. The first case would raise serious questions about the effectiveness of our state's government. The second would raise serious questions about its commitment to accountability.“

Journalism and information pros have wrestled this clunky system, and its sometimes recalcitrant agencies, for years. But viewed through the eyes of young Californians who want better government, the situation can be seen as it is: absurd and illogical for 2011, when more public scrutiny and knowledge of government spending are badly needed.

Those who hope for a better-functioning California government ought to line up to help Sloss' organization and others pushing to get data in easy reach of citizens. A blanket "no" is the wrong response from Brown et al. If the request can't be met right away in full, it certainly can be met in part right away and over time in full.

Last week, California Common Sense launched an impressive and ambitious new "transparency portal." While the Brown administration greeted the group's records request as "onerous," CACS says it has obtained such spending data from 20 other states.

You can applaud them. You can also sign an online petition and join the push. Sloss told me he and his colleagues don't want just to post data, they want to "start a movement" for transparency.

As the recent FCC report on news needs in communities noted, the internet makes it possible for government to open up information to citizens, and for citizens to seek accountability from leaders on managing spending (and cuts).

But that only works when the information is A) available and b) accessible.

Sounds just right for a movement.

* Modified from original to correct organization's acronym, which is CACS.