Doc Searls Weblog

This session is about saving and advancing journalism by creating a new kind of news flow—one that starts with calendars (which tell journalists about the upcoming future) and ends with archiving finished work and the facts that inform it.

Journalism today faces unprecedented problems as the industry moves from print and broadcast media into digital ones where the noise level is high and the media itself are ephemeral. The World Wide Web, conceived originally as a library of documents, has become a vast whiteboard on which creative work is both written and wiped constantly.

In the course of this transition, countless newspaper, magazine, and online publications are disappearing, along with their archives. This removes a priceless resource for journalism in the present and future.

To address this problem, we propose a sustainable approach to news production that is being pioneered in Bloomington, Indiana. It begins by gathering syndicated community calendars to a single record of future events, proceeds through the production of stories and other useful documents, and culminates in permanent archives of past calendars, published stories, and the relevant documents that informed those stories. This structured approach ensures that news remains a vital, enduring resource that is constantly renewed. If this model proves out, it can provide an easily repeatable model for communities everywhere.