Open Journalism and Free Speech

( About the Pic: This is a comic strip made by Bart from a famous The Simpsons Episode ( Season 15 Ep 22 - Fraudcast News ) where Burns buysout all the major media houses in Springfield in order to increase his popularity and Lisa starts her own daily in protest of this. This is a cartoon strip from one of the issues. )

Free Speech is one of the most important rights provided by the constitution. But it has no meaning if there is no proper channel to exercise it. A recent development has brought this problem to everyones attention. Gaurav Sabnis attemted to shed light on the questionable marketing ploy by IIPM, and ended up losing his job at IBM. Newspapers were initially skeptical about publishing his story due to IIPM's heavy ad budget ( main source of their revenue ;)

What we are missing currently ? Major portion of mass media is owned by corporate powerhouses governed by economic and political interests. This results in a Media Bias . A major portion of what we call news is actually moderated piece of information, just enough information to suit their economic and political interests. So, we are missing a medium to exercise true "free speech", without ownership and moderation.

Open Journalism provides an interesting solution to the problem. Firstly, let us consider what exactly we mean by Open Journalism. The sense of "openness" is analogous to that in "open source software"(OSS). In OSS, the source code of the program is available for the user to modify ( patch bugs, add enhancements etc. ). Thus the user community collaboratively works to enhance the software. Similarly, in Open Journalism, anyone is able to report a story and everyone is free to comment on it. This provides an ideal mechanism to implement Free Speech.

Implementation What better medium to implement this than the internet. Although implementing Open Journalism in its purest form ( without moderation and censorship ) and still maintain its usefulness is a difficult task, we make a humble effort towards a close approximation to it. The exact details are still being finalised ( collaborative filtering, distributed moderation etc. ) If any of this sounds interesting you can contact me at shah.paritosh@gmail.com