A power shift is underway

I've talked before about the need to join forces -- both to find the future of news (by collaborating with other news organizations) and to find the news itself (by collaborating with the general public). It's not an original idea, of course -- though it sometimes sounds pretty revolutionary within the media world.

Still, this is the point that others who follow broader trends in the world of business and industry are making as well. And they also note that the news business--because it is a business--is not immune to these emerging realities. Specifically, it's a point that Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams make in their new book, Wikinomics:

"A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish.

"Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated, cut off from the networks that are sharing, adpating, and updating knowledge to create value."

So come on news organizations. Stop operating in isolation. Join forces to create the future. And deliver ever better news.

Photo courtesy of Valerie Everett. Creative Commons license.

Getting ahead--and producing better journalism--by letting others help us

Wikinomics is a great new book about the open source economy that holds important lessons for us journalists.

The subtitle "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" underlines the book's thesis. Technology has made it possible for people to collaborate on projects in ways never before possible. Industries that grasp the power of collaboration, and put it to use in product development, are getting ahead.

Proctor & Gamble, for example, once an insular company, now famously outsources much of its R&D, through a program called "Connect & Develop." The company publicizes a research question they're working on and promise a big payoff to the researcher anywhere in the world who solves it for them. Thousands of individuals or smaller companies around the world, with deeper experience in the relevant areas than P&G has in-house, race to try to find the answer first. The approach gets P&G farther faster than when they did all their research, secretively, in-house.

The book is full of such examples in which companies that open themselves up and invite the participation of anyone who's inspired to participate actually get ahead faster than those who try to keep everything in-house.

So what does this have to do with journalism?

Journalism is a notoriously secretive profession. A reporter gets a whiff of something, tracks it down doggedly, all the while trying to keep his/her project a secret from others, less s/he get scooped.

The open source method (a name coined in the tech world for computer programming projects in which new software is developed collaboratively) could turn all this on its head. Imagine how much farther you'd get as a journalist, how much better a story you'd produce, if you told the world what you were working on and let the world help you with your reporting. Here's what you'd gain:

• A much quicker understanding of what's at stake
  
• A much more accurate interpretation of the information you've gathered
  
• Quicker access to documents
  
• Insights it never would have occured to you to look for
  
• And in the end, a deeper, richer, more accurate and more complete story

In fact, this is already happening at organizations that are giving the open source method a shot. The Fort-Myers, Fla., News-Press posted an appeal to the community to help them investigate a proposed sewer and water rate hike. The response was overwhelming. Readers flooded the paper's online forums to discuss the story and share what they knew.

The newspaper got help from everyone from retirees who had worked for sewer authorities elsewhere and could explain their ins and outs, to a local homeowner who'd been investigating on his own and had collected dozens of internal memos, to a local activist who similarly had been tracking the local utilities system and had other forms of documentation.

Just think about how much time this approach saved the News-Press and how much better an investigation they got out of it.

• One of the handicaps of being a reporter sometimes is that you don't even know what it is you need to look for. The private citizens who responded to the News-Press' appeal helped the paper clear that hurdle much faster than they would have had they fumbled along on their own.
  
  
• Another handicap is that, without deep experience in a particular domain, like sewers and rate setting, you're not sure how to interpret the information you receive. Sure, we like to think of ourselves as quick studies. But there's no substitute for someone with a lifetime of experience helping you understand the meaning behind the information you've collected.
  
  
• A final handicap is getting access to documents. Even if you know what you're looking for, it can take a while to find it. In this story the News-Press benefitted from others' legwork.

The idea of opening ourselves up to the world doubtlessly feels uncomfortable to many journalists. We've been taught to keep our cards close to our chests, lest we get scooped. And we've been taught that "we're the professionals" and, as such, that we know best how to do this journalism thing.

But in some cases, it's clear that open source methods produce better, more complete, and more accurate stories. And isn't that, in the end, what we're all aiming for?

Who's your competition? (Part 2)

A fundamental principle of free market economics, as I noted on Monday, is that businesses succeed when they offer a better product or service than their competitors. Because of this, businesses keep their cards close to their chests, especially when they're developing new offerings. Not only do they want to be the first to market. They also don't want to give away their "secret sauce."

Normally, this approach makes sense. There's one situation where it doesn't: The case in which an entire industry might collapse before any one organization with in it can find a new offering that will save its skin.

This is the situation the newspaper industry finds itself in today. Every news organization is scrambling to try to figure out how to survive the onslaught of challenges that has them slashing staffs and cutting back on coverage. Isolated experiments in new ways of delivering news are taking place here and there. But for the most part, there's very little cross-organization collaboration to find new ideas.

Newspapers are still caught up in the old idea that other news organizations are their competition. Historically, newspapers have taken a firm stand against collaborating with each other. This makes sense when you're vying for scoops on a presidential campaign trail. Or even from your local city council. It doesn't make a lot of sense when your entire survival is at stake.

Remember the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster? The one Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into Thin Air? The two climbing outfitters on the mountain that season--Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness--were die-hard competitors, perpetually vying for high-end clients to take the top of the world. When disaster struck, however, they didn't hesitate to do what needed to be done. The teams joined forces to save as many lives as possible.

It's easy to see what needs to be done when someone's life is at stake right in front of you. It's harder when the concept seems more abstract and slightly removed. But the situation the news industry faces is no less dire. Its entire existence is at stake, unless it can find its way forward.

Facing a challenge of this proportion--how to reinvent news coverage and delivery so as to ensure the industry's economic survival--requires a massive R&D effort, mainly because most experiments will fail. It's only through the collective effort that the new methods will be discovered.

I remain baffled at why there's so little collaboration between news organizations on this question. When I talk to friends in the news business, the answer seems to lie in the fact that the old mindset prevails. Instead of looking at the magnitude of the challenge and saying, "We better join forces," the competition mindset has become all the more entrenched, as news organizations seem themselves vying over the crumbs of reader clicks.

This is a short-sighted strategy. Individual organizations may prevail over others in the short run. But in the long-term, they will all go down. As Ben Franklin once said, "We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Photo courtesy of Kappa Wayfarer. Creative commons license.