So Why Do I Continue to Pay Attention to CNN?

Two reasons, basically of equal importance.

First, a huge number of other people around the world watch and read CNN's stories. If I were to immerse myself exclusively in new media sources, I'd have no idea what the average person was actually hearing about the state of our crazy planet.

Second, CNN is fast, fast, fast. They update more quickly and in a more user-friendly way than anyone else. The truly excellent news sources I prefer to use are much smaller and more financially limited organizations. They simply can't provide the scope of coverage that CNN can.

There's also the occasional excellent story or essay I run across on CNN's site, but some small quantity of precious stones can be found scattered about in any sufficiently large muddy swamp.

But back to my main two reasons for getting news from CNN. Could those reasons go away? Perhaps.

Addressing the second reason first, we may be seeing just the faintest first glimmers of an alternative to CNN's organizational structure, which tragically links ubiquitous access and super-fast filing times with shallow reporting and a constant fear of rocking the boat and losing its mainstream audience. Take note of how I syndicate content produced by such excellent and discipline-specific writers such as Glenn Greenwald and Joseph Romm. A loose network of writers distributed both in terms of geography and field of expertise may eventually be able to provide ubiquity and speed on a level that could compete with the likes of CNN.

Think of it as open source journalism. Rather than manufacturing a news product through the use of a stultifying byzantine hierarchy infected throughout with corporate hacks, this new network could operate based on voluntary syndication of content created locally under the direction of a set of standards agreed upon by some form of consensus amongst those taking part. These ideas are far from well-formed at this point. But hopefully posting them here will help change that.

So what does an open source news network need? News consumers of course, but concerning ourselves with them first would put the cart before the horse--an apt analogy as journalists are to a large degree horses that pull passive consumers along on an intellectual journey through the world. Hopefully, if someone builds it, they will come.

Continuing to work backwards from the consumers, the next logical step is the publisher. In the digital age, publishing isn't difficult. Any old website will do. And if our goals are ubiquity and speed, then it seems like a good idea to let anyone who wants to be a publisher be one. The only requirement is that they include the ads integrated into whatever content they receive. Let them add in more of their own ads if they want. As long as the original ads are included (as they are in the monetized RSS feeds I syndicate on my shared items site), whoever initially put out the item in question will continue to receive revenue from it.

Editors may or may not play an important role in open source journalism. Traditionally, editors exist to point reporters in the right direction and make sure their output is of sufficient quality. But if anyone can report and write whatever they want, there may be enough wheat mixed in with the chaff such that publishers would be able to reject any low-quality content. Thus, market forces could directly drive journalists in the direction of quality reporting and writing.

In order for open source journalism to be able to compete with an organization such as CNN, there would need to be quite a substantial network of participating writers. And as I said earlier, the participants would need to be spread out all over the place and have some degree of expertise in numerous different fields. Such people need not be full-time employees of any news organization, so they could potentially significantly outnumber the personnel even the largest news behemoth is able to employ.

Note: Though I've been using terms like "writer" a lot in this post, all of this could also apply to people creating audio and video content.

The small contributions of individuals writing about what's going on in their geographic proximity and/or field of expertise could be woven together by interconnected networks of gatekeeper-publishers. Perhaps the end product could be something as comprehensive as CNN's website. And perhaps it could even be of higher quality.

Whether or not such a system is practical, there's no doubt that some bloggers are currently engaging in reporting that is vastly superior to what's available through the mainstream media. The radical disparity between the mainstream media and the blogosphere in coverage of the current government crackdown against anti-RNC protesters in Minnesota proves this point beyond any reasonable doubt.

Currently, however, there isn't a good way to aggregate such reporting into a single news source that a casual news consumer (as opposed to a writer/nerd like me) can easily access. Unless and until we find a solution to this problem, only a small number of people are ever likely to read these stories even though they're so much better than what's available at mass market sites.