Medill’s Sunlight Opportunity
Update: Jeff Jarvis says “linkboxing” would be a good buzzword for journalistic transparency.
Like the BAE, the newspaper industry is reacting as if it is under attack. And like the book publishers, newspapers are under attack.
We’ve seen a largely reactionary response, focused on restoring the declining financials. The changes I’ve seen in journalism instruction over just a few short years indicate an increasing fascination with the buying behavior of audiences. The Social Media seminar I participated in earlier this year was full of the language of buying. Virality. Acquisition. Metrics.
Loren Ghiglione sees the problem as being less about buying, and more about believing. The faculty and students are starting to unite behind that idea, possibly energized by the ethics fracas a few months ago. Loren is the former Dean of our school, and seems to be adored universally by students and faculty. I still remember an enjoyable conversation I had with Loren about science-fiction a few years ago. His new project is related to big changes at Medill, and it’s related to ethics. It’s open - it could possibly be a New Lede for the incoming millenial freshman who are already equipped with the fundamentals of print and broadcast publishing.
But there is an important missing piece - an elevator pitch. A mission statement. A tangible goal. A few weeks ago, when I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to give a talk at the web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I was asked about what we can expect from Medill in the near future. I had trouble explaining - “Medill 2020” wasn’t descriptive enough.
At that same conference, I happened to meet a couple consultants working with the Sunlight Foundation. Since then, I’ve been knee-deep in the domain of political transparency, which ended up recently coalescing in a hobby project at http://pullquotes.org
The Foundation website explains their mission in clear terms - accountability and transparency in government, accomplished through a distributed network of services that can help both humans and other services in research and community projects.
The website doesn’t lie in calling its listed resources “insanely useful”. And the organization itself is completely transparant. For its grantees, it publishes earmarks for its funding, and it also lists a visualization of its org chart. SF doesn’t just put its money where its mouth is; it puts its mouth where its money is.
I’ve given my own elevator pitch for ethics at Medill before, and here it is again:
We’re going to revolutionize journalism education by embracing a service-oriented publishing model, where content and metadata (sources, notes, footage editing logs) are available to both humans and other services.
Yes, it means more work for students. But when reporting transparency starts to becoming a truly desirable field of expertise among the top tier of news organizations, they’ll be grateful for the experience of having led the way.
And I’m sure the Sunlight Foundation could be helpful in making that transparency be available to humans as well as machines. The Sunlight developer community members are themselves open, friendly, and transparent, and I bet they’d warm up to journalistic transparency as quickly as they have to political transparency.
Harvard has their Open Access program, and Medill could just as easily have an Open News program. That is, if it really is indeed ready to move into the light.
