Doc Searls Weblog

Eleventh in the News Commons series.

all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Ulysses

News flows. It starts with what’s coming up, goes through what’s happening, and ends up as what’s kept—if it’s lucky.

Facts take the same route. But, since lots of facts don’t fit stories about what’s happening, they aren’t always kept, even if they will prove useful in the future. (For more on that, see Stories vs. Facts.)

But we need to keep both stories and facts, and not just for journalists. Researchers and decision-makers of all kinds need all they can get of both.

That’s why a news commons needs to take care of everything from what’s coming up through what’s happened, plus all the relevant facts, whether or not they’ve shown up in published stories. We won’t get deep, wide, or whole news if we don’t facilitate the whole flow of news and facts from the future through the present and into the past.

Let’s call this the Tennyson model, after Lord Alfred’s Ulysses, excerpted above. In this model, the future is a calendar such as the one in DatePress. The present is is news reporting. The past is archives.

Calendars are easy to make. They are also easy to feed into other calendars. For example, take the Basic Government Calendar, of Bloomington, Indiana. That one is built from 50+ other calendars (to which it subscribes—and so can you). The Big Big Calendar (be patient: it takes a while to load) covers many other journalistic beats besides government (the beat of the B Square Bulletin, which publishes both).

We describe approaches to archives in The Online Local Chronicle and Archives as Commons. Here in Bloomington, we have two examples already with BloomDocs.org and The Bloomington Chronicle. Both are by Dave Askins of the B Square Bulletin using open-source code. And both are new.

Relatively speaking, Bloomington is a news oasis (see our list of media life forms in Wide News) in a world where news deserts are spreading. So we’ve got a lot to work with. If you want to help with any of it, let me know.