For Stray, too much contemporary journalism is either “in service to the status quo” or represented by a “zealous suspicion of power.” Neither of these frameworks for journalism encourage deep engagement with systems, Stray argues. He proposes a different framework, drawing on the participatory values of “maker culture” (see for example Make magazine): “Geeks who like to understand very complex systems, and tinker with them.” Journalism today lacks that drive to tinker, to fix, to make better, which is rooted in the complex intersection of a desire to know (expertise) and a desire to change. “Where is the journalism for the idealist doer with a burning curiosity?” he asks. *

Excerpted from a text by Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis:

“Open source might be what people are hoping for when they think about remaking journalism — both in terms of innovating the business/system of news, and in terms of making it more transparent and participatory.

In a widely circulated recent post, Jonathan Stray suggested that the news industry could draw on “maker culture” to create a new kind of journalism — one that plumbs the institutional and technical complexities of major issues (like global finance) in a way that invites bright, curious “makers” to hack the system for the good of society. “This is a theory of civic participation based on empowering the people who like to get their hands dirty tinkering with the future,” Stray wrote. Josh Stearns built on this line of reasoning, arguing that “maker culture is the willingness to become experts of a system, and then use that expertise to change the system.”

Their approach to “maker culture,” we believe, can have a direct and practical implementation in journalism through a focus on integrating open source into the newsroom. As both Stray and Stearns point out: Maker culture is a way of thinking — a DIY aesthetic of tinkering, playing around, and rebuilding, all without fear of failure. Just the kind of thing journalism needs.

Maker culture is bound up in the technology and ethos of hacker culture, as James Losey of the New America Foundation has helpfully showed us. Losey (and colleague Sascha Meinrath) think this kind of “internet craftsmanship” is instrumental to sustaining the very architecture of the web itself: having the freedom and control and playful curiosity to shape networking technologies to meet one’s needs. Gutenberg, as Losey and Meinrath argue, was the first hacker, fundamentally rethinking technology. And it’s from this hacker mindset that we can take cues for rebooting the tools, practices, and frameworks of journalism.

So: Add maker/hacker culture, mix in a bit of theorist Richard Sennett, who believes in the capacity of individuals to reshape and innovate new media, and sprinkle some open-source juice into journalism, and you get the following:

…

What does it mean to incorporate the tinkering and playing and reshaping of maker culture back into journalism? The news industry is one of the last great industrial hold-overs, akin to the car industry. Newsrooms are top-heavy, and built on a factory-based model of production that demands a specific output at the end of the day (or hour). They’re also hierarchical, and, depending on whom you ask, the skills of one journalist, are for the most part, interchangeable with those of most other journalists — in part because journalists share a common set of values, norms, and ideals about what it means to do their work.

Thus, merging elements of maker culture and journalism culture might not be easy. Challenging the status quo is hard. The expectations of producing content, of “feeding the beast,” might get in the way of thinking about and tinkering with the software of news, maker-style. It can’t just be the newsroom technologists hacking the news system; it has to be journalists, all of them, reflecting on what it means to do news differently. We have to make time for journalists to rethink and reshape journalism like a hacker would retool a piece of code.

…

So if we think about the story as code, what happens? It might seem radical, but try to imagine it: Journalists writing code as the building blocks for the story. And while they write this code, it can be commented on, shared, fact-checked, or augmented with additional information such as photos, tweets, and the like. This doesn’t have to mean that a journalist loses control over the story. But it opens up the story, and puts it on a platform where all kinds of communities can actively participating as co-makers.

In this way, it’s a bit like the “networked journalism” envisioned by Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Beckett — although this code-tweaking and collaboration can come after the point of initial publication. So, your investigative pieces are safe — they aren’t open-sourced — until they become the source code for even more digging from the public.

In all of this thinking of the ways open source is changing journalism, there are some clear caveats:

1. For open-source projects to succeed, they require lots of people, a truly robust network of regular contributors. Given the amount of time that people might be willing to spend with any one article, or with news in general, who knows whether the real public affairs journalism that might benefit the most from open source would, in fact, get the kind of attention it needs to change the framework.

2. Open source requires some form of leadership. Either you have someone at the top making all the decisions, or you have some distributed hierarchy. As one newspaper editor told a fellow academic, Sue Robinson, in her study of participatory journalism: “Someone’s gotta be in control here.”