It's an Open Source World

When I began using The Vancouver Observer's new drupal open source software on October 2, I quickly realized that I had a platform at my fingertips that was powerful enough  to push the work of hundreds of reporters and bloggers into the world.

It was like I had been driving a car but suddenly I was flying a magnificent jet.    It could go a long way, but  I had to learn how to drive it.  I've been busy learning.  And as I've been learning, a stream of talented, experienced writers have contacted me through the "Contribute" button and joined our team, and they've been learning, too.   At least one new person contacts me every day.  Somedays as many as five.  

And because the new software  has more capacity, it  requires more managers and co-managers.  At first, Meghan Strain, assistant publisher of VO, and I tried to do it all.  We caught on pretty quickly that this wasn't viable. Then we  put out a call for volunteers.  

We posted on university websites all around town.   Since then:

1. Twenty volunteers have joined our team from UBC, BCIT, Kwantlien University Journalism program,  SFU, and elsewhere.  The volunteers range from recent graduates to students to professionals in the early stages of their careers.  Their backgrounds include political science, English, journalism, communications, and computer studies.  They volunteer from between one day a week to three.  They are each awesome in their own way and bringing so much value to the Vancouver Observer.  If you think journalism is in trouble, think again.  With input from graduates and students like these, the future looks very bright to me.

Some want to learn about social networking.  Some want to focus on the back-end of the operation: software, linking, posting. A few want to write or edit.  I work with those who want to write, sending them on assignments and then going through their articles and making suggestions.  

Some come with impressive journalism credentials.  

2.  Every day, we receive new queries from bloggers.  Recent additions:
Lalo Espejo (Unauthorized), Tris Hussey (Techplanations), Elianna Lev (I'm A Good Story).   Stacey Robinsmith of Leftcoast.ca took over the Political Junkie blog.  Stephanie Orford launched Dream Home, a blog about fantastical home design.

Jonathan Ross of CivicScene.ca began cross-posting on VO, bringing a fresh look at civic politics to our pages.


CBC reporter Elaine Chau launched Richmond Ramblings.

Ana Kaye Ling began reporting for VO with an article about the protest against proposed cuts to midwifery education programs.  She went on to write an open letter to Stephen Colbert.

My  apartment is a newsroom by day. By night it reverts to a family home.  The kids love to leave stuff on the VO desk.  They prefer it over any other place in the house for dropping drawings, paper cuttings, backpacks...odds and ends that remind me of them.

Our dog, Pookie, staffs the front door by day.   At the sound of the buzzer,  her head lifts up and she leaps off the bench and whines frenetically as if to say: "Finally, you're here!"

Even as I wrote this post, I checked my Iphone and two more emails came in from students offering their services as volunteers.  Truly, it's become a constant flow.  I'm both amazed and grateful.  It looks like many people are eager to fill the gap in local writing and reporting about the place they call home.

3. The Knight Foundation Challenge extended the deadline to December 15th for the grant applications.  They are giving away 25 million a year to encourage innovation in journalism.  This will be their fourth year.  So Team Vancouver has been involved in brainstorming how to boil our proposal down to a paragraph and hopefully make it through the first hoops to the cross cultural platform we are dreaming of creating.  What will that look like?  What can open-source software do to facilitate it?  We came up with a few great ideas, primarily to extend VO to a cross cultural multi-language platform, but in the end, we didn't apply.  Too much to do, too little time.  We were too late getting going on it to build the relationships necessary to make a compelling proposal. It got us all thinking, though and next year we'll be ready.

4. I ran into Matthew Snyder, cross-media strategist, formerly of Nokia, in the hot tub of my building and we began brainstorming the digital potential of the Vancouver Observer and how we might link that to, well, a million other things.  We started thinking of a print link between computers and hand held devices that you'd get on the Canada Line.

5. A talented volunteer, Cathi Atmadjaja, launched our initative (more of a goal than a reality at this point) to provide summaries of articles in translation  at the end of articles in Mandarin.

Creating a new mainstream media demands a quantum leap away from old school journalism.  That's my learning curve. But I'd like to bring some of the best of old school journalism along for the ride: integrity, credibility, tackling difficult stories, doing in-depth reporting, and, above all else, telling a good story.

I wrote this blog entry  in the cozy Elysian Cafe at Broadway and Ash on a grey winter morning  (how do Alistair Durie and his partner----- make the Elysian Cafe  such a magnet for interesting-looking people absorbed in their work?). I was drinking a cup of Panama blend (a hint of milk chocolate), although when I arrived at the coffee shop, they were out of Panama blend.  The tall, lanky barista had been telling me about the mathematics of throwing a textbook across a room and it landing on the target of a big pile of socks, of functionality and flow.   His story engaged me completely, despite its length.  I asked for Panama.  "We're out," he said.  He was taking high school math because in high school he hated math.  "Because we're in Canada, it's free," he said.  "And look, we DO have Panama blend."  I turned to see a delivery man wheeling in three boxes of coffee.  "See," he said.  "Functionality. Flow. We're managing incredible complexity all the time and we don't even know it."

I sat down at the counter by the photograph by Alistair Durie of the women at Cuzcachapa hand-sorting coffee beans. I waited for my coffee and  thought about the open source world of new media and the last month and a half since the Vancouver Observer's relaunch, a month that has blown open my old school mind to the barely explored new digital media frontier.  

And I thought how behind every website,  computer and hand held device is a person, a heart and a mind; a team, an organization, a movement, or a revolution representing hundreds to millions of hearts and minds.  Surfing huge waves of disembodied messages daily with their images, articles, blogs and searches creates a sensual detachment from the warm, pulsing bodies connected to them, the minds  that imagined  them, the longings and sorrows of those hearts, the triumphs of the spirits, the losses, the gains,  the facial characteristics, hair color, body shape, the emotion revealed in each unique set of eyes.

One final note...I love this excerpt from Tina Brown's "Things to Stop Bitching About in 2010:"

 Newspapers are dying because of the Internet. Investigative journalism is finished!

What a load of Spam! American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long a whole generation gave up on them. They needed to innovate back in the Fax Age of the 1980s but were too self-important and making too much money with their monopolies to acknowledge it.

In the U.K., there is a banquet of glorious newspapers to feast on in the morning despite the presence of the Internet. All of these papers look nothing like they did 15 years ago. Furrow-browed broadsheets like The Times of London and The Guardian got snappy new overhauls, cut down to a more modern-feeling tabloid size, with a use of pictures and color that's imaginative and striking and appealing to the younger demographic.

These "serious" papers are replete with sexy culture coverage and hip fashion stories as well as foreign reporting and brainiac columnists that make them a guilty pleasure to read. It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs. As for the Internet thieving the bona fide news reporters' hard-worked stories, "Back at ya!" is all I can say. Online writers for years have had their stories ripped off by newspapers with no credit. At least the Internet links to the things it steals. Whatever his views on this issue, by the way, Rupert Murdoch has greatly improved The Wall Street Journal. Leave it to an Aussie to give American journalism a swift kick in its down under.