Journalistic Licensing as a Balance to Open-Source Journalism Practices

John F Dillon

doi:10.4172/2165-7912.1000e108

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Dillon J. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. At the risk of oversimplification, “open-source journalism” can be thought of as the technique of newsgathering, fact-checking, and news dissemination on the part of a wide variety of people, without necessary application of some stringent rules of Western journalism. Whereas news gathering has long been the domain of trained news reporters and editors -with the goal of presentation of objective facts -today’s Internet environment includes bloggers and pundits whose main sourcing of information may well be borrowed or presented with a subjective agenda [1].

Highlights

At the risk of oversimplification, “open-source journalism” can be thought of as the technique of newsgathering, fact-checking, and news dissemination on the part of a wide variety of people, without necessary application of some stringent rules of Western journalism
The question becomes how information sharing might be balanced with the evolved standards of empirically-based, fairminded journalism
It is fair to say that there is no stopping the “democracy of distribution” that we see in philosophies of open-sourcing and the Digital Commons [3,4]

Summary

Introduction

At the risk of oversimplification, “open-source journalism” can be thought of as the technique of newsgathering, fact-checking, and news dissemination on the part of a wide variety of people, without necessary application of some stringent rules of Western journalism. The question becomes how information sharing might be balanced with the evolved standards of empirically-based, fairminded journalism. The answer may well lie in a practice which has been condemned for decades in Western thought: The certification or licensing of journalistic practitioners.

Results

Conclusion