Publishers embrace open source

Source: Nieman Lab

"By 2024, we'll see more publishers abandon closed systems in favor of products that don't conform to the whim of Silicon Valley executives." ajustan al capricho de los ejecutivos de Silicon Valley».

Excerpt by Dana Lacy

Publishers are more skeptical than ever, and they should be. After a particularly tough year of being undercut by the big tech companies, publishers will be forced to develop strategies to reduce their dependence on tech companies. Finally, they will see open source software as a competitive advantage and the cheapest way to keep up with the pace of innovation. They will explore ways to use open source technology to combat misinformation, personalize content, and reach new audiences by leveraging global expertise.

Publishers have always been slow to embrace technology and often unprepared to adopt emerging ideas. There have been some honorable attempts by publishers to create and license their own newsroom technologies, but most eventually discovered that they cannot compete with fast-moving technology companies. Earlier this year, Vox Media announced that they would be shutting down Chorus, their homegrown CMS, and would no longer license newsrooms (See also: Gawker's Kinja and WaPo's Zeus).

Open source as a concept is not new; it has been around in some form since the 1950s. Other industries have built massive businesses with open source, such as NASA, Microsoft and Amazon's AWS. By making software open source, it allows anyone to create their own version of it. When engineers can leverage code that already has the problems solved, they can focus on imagining something much better than the original. For example, Firefox is created by thousands of people around the world and WordPress has over 60,000 open source plugins created by a 20-year community of developers.

It's not just the big companies: third-party vendors will face the same scrutiny. In 2024, we will see more publishers abandon closed systems in favor of products that don't conform to the whim of Silicon Valley executives. Fortunately, the rise of open source platforms like Mastodon has helped demystify the potential of collaborative technology in newsrooms. There is much to learn from projects like OpenNews, a network of developers, designers and journalists collaborating on open journalism technologies. And, best of all, publishers will no longer have to restrict innovation to a small group of employees and hope for the best.