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Open Source JournalismOpen source journalism, a close cousin to citizen journalism or participatory journalism, is a term coined in the title of a 1999 article by Andrew Leonard of Salon.com. Although the term was not actually used in the body text of Leonard's article, the headline encapsulated a collaboration between users of the internet technology weblog Slashdot and a writer for Jane's Intelligence Review. The writer, Johan J. Ingles-le Nobel, had solicited feedback on a story about cyberterrorism from Slashdot readers, and then re-wrote his story based on that feedback and compensated the Slashdot writers whose information and words he used. This early usage of the phrase clearly implied the paid use, by a mainstream journalist, of copyright-protected posts made in a public online forum. It thus referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open source intelligence. The meaning of the term has since changed and broadened, and it is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist. The term 'open source journalism' is often used to describe a spectrum on online publications: from various forms of semi-participatory online community journalism (as exemplified by projects such as the copyright newspaper NorthWest Voice), through to genuine open source news publications (such as the Spanish 20 Minutes, and WikiNews). Usage At first sight, it would appear to many that weblogs fit within the current meaning of 'open source journalism'. Yet the term's use of open source clearly currently implies the meaning as given to it by the open source software movement; where the source code of programs is published openly to allow anyone to locate and fix mistakes or add new functions. Anyone may also freely take and re-use that source code in order to create new works, within set licence parameters. But the text of the overwhelming majority of blogs is not 'open source', in the sense that one cannot substantially take the weblogger's words or visitor comments and re-use them in another form without breaching the author's copyright or making payment. Weblogging cannot therefore be simply elided with 'open source journalism'; unless one reverts to the original unsatisfactory sense of the term (ie: 'news gathering and fact-checking by using public sources and forums', which is merely standard journalistic practice). See also:
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