fling93 loves fishies

Open Source Journalism

I know I’ve already said a lot about blogging and journalism, but in light of Ra^thergate (the spectacular implosion of Dan Rather and CBS over the forged memos regarding Dubya’s National Guard service) and an interesting discussion at Asymmetrical Information, I had one more quick thought to add, albeit not the most original one in the world: blogging as “Open Source Journalism.”

For those non-geeks unclear on the concept, a real good in-depth description of the open-source programming process and why it works is The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond (also available in paperback). In short, a bunch of independent and voluntary programmers can create complex software programs rivaling and even exceeding the quality of that produced by major corporations. One big reason is the debugging process. Raymond discusses it here, but it’s a bit technical, so let me explain it myself.

Currently, testing and debugging a large software project can often take longer than it does to write the actual code. The debugging process involves gathering information about a program’s strange behavior, coming up with theories to explain it, inspecting the related code, experimenting with changes in the code to see how it alters the behavior, etc. A corporation typically assigns different developers to investigate separate bugs.

With open source, you end up with a ton of different developers (often thousands) looking at the same problem independently. As I believe Linus Torvalds says, the more eyeballs you have looking at a bug, the more likely it is that the solution will be immediately obvious to somebody. So instead of going through the long debugging process, someone will instantly recognize the behavior from experience or have an intuitive idea of what might be the cause. Or at the very least, somebody out of the whole group will just happen to try the right thing first. Then they can quickly fix and verify it. And as long as the project releases early and often, the fix will get propagated to other developers before they spend too much time debugging the same issue. It’s like looking at every single possible angle of the problem at the same time.

Blogging seems to work the same way. With enough bloggers looking at a piece of news or evidence, it’s likely that anything suspicious will be noticed immediately. And similar to testing and verifying, different blogs and commenters will often vigorously debate the issue in comments and trackback pings, a kind of dialogue that mainstream media discourages. Whis is exactly what happened in the CBS affair (as well as with John Lott and the fictitious Mary Rosh, as Julian Sanchez noted last year).

Although plenty of the participants will be quite partisan (a charge CBS frequently leveled at its blogging attackers without any hint of irony), the sheer number and variety of participants has an almost magical effect on the result. Might be something to do with James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (which I haven’t read, but everybody from Alex Tabarrok to Brayden King to my sister seems to be recommending it).

In fact, you do see very similar effects in free market economics. Via Tantek, Michael Van Winkle at Tech Central Station has an interesting article pointing out that this is exactly how economist Friedrich A. Hayek said it would work:

Hayek’s work focused on how it is that complicated and reliable systems of cooperation come about without any centralized direction. When they do, they outperform systems of “command”, systems that rely on central direction. …

We’ve all heard critics of the Internet claim that, because no one “controls” it, no one can control it from disseminating the most outrageous rumors and conspiracies. A similar critique was leveled at Hayek’s arguments about markets: Sure, markets (spontaneous systems) can deliver food at reasonable prices, but advertising and marketing often mislead people about which foods they should buy.

This traditional criticism of the internet has now been aimed at the blogosphere and is embodied by big journalists like Jonathan Klein who, while defending the CBS story to The Weekly Standard remarked, “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at ‘60 Minutes’] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.” Klein misses the point that it’s not whether you can trust some guy in his pajamas, but whether you can trust a spontaneous system of thousands of guys in their pajamas trading information and imparting small, sometimes deceivingly insignificant, bits of information.

What we’ve seen in the last few years is a gradual refutation of the Klein myth, that “Big Media” is more capable of sorting the truth than are 3,872,561 blogs.

Of course, with so many bloggers, there’s the inevitable duplication of effort, and this very post is no exception. This is why it’s a good idea to at least do some Googling on a topic before writing about it, just to see if somebody else had the same idea. So instead of writing a conclusion, let me just quote Miguel Centellas from Western Herald Online

How much does the Associated Press pay in salaries to each of its stringers? Or to staff their various bureau offices? Now compare that to an organic blogosphere, where each member writes open source news — sharing freely with other members. And there are more bloggers than there are AP stringers, spread out even in countries with no AP presence, immersed in the local cultures and politics. Which is more efficient as a news-gathering organization, the blogosphere or the Associated Press?

But this is a revolution in news media not only because the gathering of news becomes decentralized, but also because it’s an open communication line. Unlike television, newspapers or even radio, weblogs allow comments. Think of these as letters to the editor in your local newspaper. Except there’s no editor restricting who can or can’t comment. And other readers can comment on the comments of others. And as often as they want.

The closest thing to this in the analog world is talk radio. But even that’s limited. First of all, you can only call in during the hours the show’s on air. There’s someone screening calls, and limiting you to a few seconds. With weblogs, you can comment on a story from yesterday. It’s an actual conversation, not a lecture punctuated by questions from the “audience.” Why? Because open source news doesn’t have an audience to begin with — everyone involved comes on equal footing, everyone’s part of the conversation and everyone else provides content.

And that’s something big media can’t give us: news of the people — by the people and for the people.

I couldn’t have said it any better — which is why I didn’t try and just quoted him so that I could spend more time lounging around in my pajamas.