Doug Fisher is hosting this month’s Carnival of Journalism. He asks: “What changes will need to be made in national and
international legal systems to help the digital age, and especially
journalism in the digital age, flourish?
My first response is to say: Listen to Shirky talk about the Creative Commons version of starting Corporations. (Video by David Spark of Spark Minute).
Now, if that didn’t blow your mind – here are some more practical thoughts.
1. I hate bureaucracy. I learn more and more about it every day since starting Spot Us which is technically a 501c3. Let me tell you – bureaucracy is not fun stuff. I realize being an adult can suck at times – but does it have to suck so much that it actually constrain innovation? I think that’s what Shirky is discussing. Just as the Creative Commons has built the legal framework through which people can be creative – we need a legal framework where groups of people can be creative together without being stifled.
2. As for news organizations: We should think more about Creative Commons licensing our content. I know it goes against the tradition of the scoop, which has been near and dear to our culture since the beginning, but scoops have the half-life equivalent to a link. If our information was made freely available and became the building blocks through which other work could be done – we would be the foundation upon which the news and information world is built upon.
Example: Take a national story that exists at local levels.
The environment.
Get 100 papers from around the country to agree to work on the story together: “Cover local environmental degradation in your area, but share the findings openly with the other 99 papers the whole time.”
Each paper gets their local scoop. The sum is greater than any of the parts. And with the right CC license – you leave room for citizen journalists to come in and fill up gaps or update the story.
You effectively create THE resource of geographic examples of environmental degradation.
Other stories that are national and local at the same time:
- The effects of No Child Left Behind.
- Sub prime mortgage.
- I’m sure there is no shortage of these.
To pull off a project like this you need a different legal structure (as well as the willingness of 100 papers to try something innovative – but that time might just be now). I’ll tell you this – if you were able to find 100 papers who agreed to ban together to tackle a story like this – they would be stifled by the bureaucracy that would be involved right now. I’m not talking about technology bureaucracy – I’m talking about business and legal issues. The technology wouldn’t be that difficult. Hell – you could do it with a wiki if you wanted.
Great post Dave, incredibly insightful stuff here. With the AP obviously moving at a dinosaur’s pace and just a handful of news organizations with a progressive agenda now is the time to introduce these concepts. As a journalist, I never thought of my content like that of an artist, but more as a service provider for my community. The Creative Commons makes sense here.
What’s the mechanism for finding a lawyer to write a new type of CC-licence? Is there one? Some sort of “Time Delay Fuse CC” could be great for journalism: a story would be locked down for a week or month or whatever, and then explicitly released into CC after that specified period of time.