- newsrooms agree that, eventually, their source material will become public
- in return they get OCR, cross referencing and full text search (and the public hosting?) for free (or so it seems to me)
so it is the newsroom input rather than the output.
If that gains any traction, it seems to me that there are two likely outcomes:
1. Important stories will get discussed longer.
There will be the initial (commercially driven) headline grabbing, (advertising) paid splash. Then, when the documents go public, the rest of the population/bloggers can get stuck into the debate and slice and dice the data.
Thats good - more eyeballs, more discussion, more review. Plus, just setting information free in a digital format is a huge win.
2. “News” publications will win on the quality of their journalism
There will be the trash mags with sensational headlines. Then there will be those who are doing the old school jouralism thing. Investigating. Reporting. Doing the hard work.
Because they will be publishing their sources, those who do the best job will get the most respect.
And respect = eyeballs = profit these days. Just ask Apple (or Microsoft).
See also
whatdotheyknow.com, who are trying to become a central clearing house for UK Freedom of information requests. Like all good mysociety.org projects, they leave me thinking that really, this is what any modern government should be doing (or using our taxes to fund people like mysociety to do) on behalf of it’s population.
Namely, that in addition to making the laws that allow the Freedom of Information thing to happen, they should also be ensuring that once the information is out, it’s available for everyone to get at. That network effect thing. One of the central problems that whatdotheyknow is solving is
if I make a FOI request, and you want the same data, you have to make the request again.
How dumb is that?
Leave a comment