[Wikipedia-l] [mriddle at MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US: Re: reason magazine]

Tue May 6 22:13:43 UTC 2003

Distributed journalism via blogs... I'm just forwarding this to this
list because we've chatted in the past about wikimedia and the possibility
of a wiki-style news site.

----- Forwarded message from Mike Riddle <mriddle at MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US> -----

From: Mike Riddle <mriddle at MONARCH.PAPILLION.NE.US>
Date:         Tue, 6 May 2003 16:58:04 -0500
To: FIREARMSREGPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
Subject:      Re: reason magazine

On Tue, 6 May 2003 16:47:37 -0500, Robert Woolley wrote:

>There is an article in the 5/03 Reason magazine by Julian Sanchez (I think
>that's the name) about John Lott, Mary Rosh, and distributed investigative
>journalism by bloggers. It mentions this very list, as well as members of
>it, naturally.

The Mystery of Mary Rosh
How a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle.
By Julian Sanchez

Stories that might never be broken if a single reporter had to spend days
researching them are now being covered by dilettante swarms rather than
diligent professionals. It s a new form of journalism, reminiscent less of old-
fashioned investigative reporting than of the decentralized "peer production"
that generates open source software. If it had a slogan, it might be "We
report, we decide."

New York University law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that open source
works because programming is a "granular" task -- the job of coding a massive
piece of software can be broken into many small pieces -- and because the
Internet allows the rapid collating and peer filtering of work done by
thousands of dispersed individuals. Traditional programming requires a few
coders to commit a lot of time and effort, for which they will reasonably
expect to be paid. When the software s source code is freely available,
however, the big job can be done in small increments by a large pool of
volunteers. The results are filtered for quality the same way, with superior
pieces of coding copied and spread through the population.

Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur
to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same
topic. The ability to concatenate that information online -- particularly via
those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs -- makes the
information discovered by each available to all.

To see the process in action, consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More
Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime.

[continues at http://www.reason.com/0305/co.js.the.shtml]

----- End forwarded message -----