I’ve always been interested in journalism. At it’s core, it’s a great and noble endeavour, one that’s necessary for the function and health of any great nation. It keeps closed doors opened, informs the electorate and promotes the transparency needed for a healthy society and economy.

However, the industry has gone through a few changes that have caused it to stumble. In Philly alone, a city of 1,560,297 people, we have only one major paper who has gone through some tough times. While there are a plethora of awesome new, forward thinking groups coming forward to fill that gap, there’s still much more to be done.

What’s the major cause of the industry’s decline? It’s easy to blame it on technology — you know, the curse of not utilizing the paywall, or not getting on to social media quick enough, or not speaking to the right demographics.

While all of these might play a part, I think they miss the point. To me, the major sin that the industry has committed has been it’s inability to utilize it’s resources efficiently.

The Problem

From Flickr user www.audio-luci-store.it

In the journo-world, the scoop is king. To this end, several outlets in any given market will have it’s most qualified reporters chasing the same story, in hopes that their outlet will get the news out first before everyone else.

While working for outlets in State College, it always bent my mind to see the big 3 outlets in the area — The Daily Collegian, Onward State and the Centre Daily Times (full disclosure: I have worked for two of the three) — all send a reporter to the same Town Hall meeting, to essentially tell the same story, most of the time in the same voice and style (with the exception of Onward State who gave it’s reporters the freedom to have a personality), sometimes tweeting the same quotes and leading them all to the same conclusions.

While it can be valuable to send reporters to same event to subjectively review or analyze it, when news outlets confine their reporters to a strict storytelling and writing style, this entire situation becomes a tale of redundancy, where organizations running out of money are spending it to compete with each other to produce almost identical content.

This is not solely a local phenomenon either — whenever a major news event happens, you can take a look at the front page of the major newspapers across the country and see that each of the wrote a similar version of the same story, using the same quotes, with only small differences in perspectives.

I’m not advocating for a world where objectivity is placed to the wayside (that’s an entirely different conversation) — Town Hall stories and their equivalents are valuable, and telling them objectively is the bedrock of future analysis. But when you spend your scarce resources on the ‘reporting’ rather than the analysis, society as a whole loses.

This differs greatly from the technology world, where companies are incentivized to both use and produce open-source standards-based software, that allows it’s programmers to not re-invent the wheel every time they do common things. It moves the competitive energy upwards, so companies compete with ideas and perspectives, rather than who can write the best JavaScript or Java task runner, or even repeat even more foundational things like a kernel, C-compiler or HTTP Server (programs you’ve used daily but probably never knew existed). If tech companies had to create these for every program they created, we would never be where we are now.

By and large, the journalism industry has not achieved similar efficiencies, stunting it’s growth. There’s on exception to this model, however, the news wire.

Okay, so what is a News Wire?

So much news, so many screens

You know that clicking sound in the background of newsrooms in those old movies you watch? That’s the sound of a news wire printing out breaking news from around the world, enabling the hero to get the scoop and tie it together with his battle against the villain. Eureka!

Services like this still exist, albeit without the nostalgic sound effect. Traditionally, outlets pay a subscription fee to companies like Associated Press who have boots on the ground in areas they can’t afford to be at. The AP produces high-quality content which it then sells the right to local papers (and other publications) to publish with their by-lines.

The stories serve multiple purposes — to get news around the world fast, allow smaller papers to get (inter)national news to their readers, to help them fill space in their papers they can’t afford to and to give the world the raw information necessary to allow others to analyze and tie it with stories they’re researching.

This is a great system — local outlets pay a small fee to an organization who can report content in far-flung areas of the world that need attention. The larger wire takes all of these fees and funds trips that would be too expensive or niche for any one paper to cover. It’s efficient, and helps get news out quickly.

Why can’t we do something like that on a localized level? And why can’t we do it for free?

A Crack at a Solution

Eureka!

OpenWire is a crack at this — it’s an open-source platform that encourages users (be them journalists, citizens, anyone) to sign up and begin contributing. Users can input new stories (the platform grabs twitter trends from your area if you give it permission), and submit them to the group for editing and proofreading.

Once a story enters this stage, other users review it, making edits, adding sources, ideas, and in general enrich the story. This is heavily inspired by both Wikipedia and platforms like Stack Overflow. Users then read these stories while they’re being edited, and vote them up or down. Once a story reaches a certain threshold of approval votes, it is automatically pushed to a syndicated RSS feed, which can be picked up by any website or news source for free.

The idea is to leverage limited resources (be them trained journalists or informed citizens) to create content that can be used and syndicated to all organizations quickly and efficiently, lowering costs for the ‘raw’ material to allow them to be used to analyze and build on it, giving their readers (and society) more original and thought-provoking content rather than re-iterating what the competition has published.

The code is entirely open (you can find the UI here and the API here). At this point, it’s fairly buggy (for example, the permissions model is non-existent, and error messages aren’t helpful) and could stand some solid improvements (like allowing formatting of the stories) — but, it’s an MVP that I hope illustrates a model that’s worth investigating.

Licensing

All content created by users is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This means that it can be used for free, commercialized and adapted, as long as the derivative content is licensed similarly.

The code and platform itself is entirely open (you can find the UI code here and the API here), and is similarly copylefted, under the GPLv3. This gives the anyone the freedom to use, alter, contribute and distribute the code — as long as any resulting code also carries the same license.

My hope is that both of these licensing decisions create a collaborative incentive —developers across organizations can find issues (there’s probably plenty) and improve the platform, all the while pushing the code back into the central repository so that other organizations can do the same.

As many organizations cannot afford many developers (the exceptions being the wonderful team at the NY Times and Vox), my hope is that smaller newsrooms can essentially share code and bring up their industry as a whole to help reach their collective goals.

What’s Next (where can this go?)

While OpenWire was originally written in a fever dream, in which creating a new open syndicate that provided content to all was a priority, I’ve since began to view it in a slightly different light.

The open nature of the platform (it’s written in Node, backed up by an incredibly affordable Parse.com instance, with a front-end that can be deployed in any HTTP server) along with the licensing, means that it can be taken in a number of different directions.

• A local market (like State College) could collectively host an instance in which reporters from each paper can contribute. This could be hosted behind a firewall (if they don’t want the information public before it’s published), and they can share writing and copy editing resources. The RSS feed could be published only among them to notify partners of newly completed stories.

• A large, single company with a distributed workforce (like Technical.ly, Vox or Vice News) can host it on a local box to supplement their existing (likely Wordpress) workflow, in the processes connecting their reporters on each others stories and centralizing it to some extent.

• A crazy person can host a single instance (à la Facebook), where anyone can contribute and the result can be consolidated at scale to all news outlets, for free.

All of these would require enhancements. But hopefully, if any of one of these avenues is taken, the results would be shared not only across all avenues, helping smaller organizations more adequately use their resources to do what they’re meant to — tell the news.

How to Get Started

I’ve hosted a public instance of OpenWire at OpenWi.re. This is hosted on a free heroku server, which utilizes a Parse DB instance and Twitter API I’ve put together. You can utilize this to fool around (please don’t put any sensitive information in here) and generate feedback/ideas.

All of the code his hosted on GitHub — it is divided into the UI (written in Marionette, Backbone, and Node.js) and the API (Node.js using tools like Underscore and Express). Both can be run locally quickly (instructions are included in the README.md file of each) and hooked into private instances DB instances easily.

Nothing would make me happier than to get some feedback, especially if they’re in the form of Pull Requests and Github issues.

My hope is that this plays some small part in influencing news culture, and in my wildest dreams, acts as a starting point for someone (or a group of people) to carry this idea to places I never imagined it would go.

Go forth and conquer!