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# Jarvis describes ... what oD tries to do
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/jarvis-describes-what-od-tries-to-do/
- Published: 2008-10-27T11:10:19.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:42:03.000Z
- Author: Tony Curzon Price
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:49

Here is [Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/27/digitalmedia?ref=opendemocracy.net) today:

"I want a page, a site, a something that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will include articles. But it's also a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It's a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It's an aggregator that provides curated and annotated links to experts, coverage from elsewhere, a mix of opinion and source material. Finally, it's a discussion that doesn't just blather but tries to add value. It's collaborative and distributed and open but organised.

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter's head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter. Everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room - and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information.

It's not an article, a story, a section, a bureau, a paper, a show, a search engine. It's something new. What do we call it? The topic table? The beat bliki (ouch)? The news brain? I don't know. We'll know what to call it when we see it."

Jeff talks about the unsatisfactory atomisation that blogism has brought, and I have tried to express this in my piece on "[The Blind Newsmaker](https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/media/blind%5Fnewsmaker)". There is a sort of fallacy of decomposition that says that the web can recombine all the bits of journalism to create a satsifactory whole. Blogism does not produce the right atoms for that, because *how* you create determines *what* you create.

My view is that *commissioning* is the ingredient that has too often been dropped from the auto-publish web. In his article, Jeff is asking for coherence, for meaning, for a discursive arrival at partial understandings. The editorial conversations that lead to commissioning are at the heart of the creation of temorary moments of understanding.

openDemocracy's "[open source model for news analysis](https://www.opendemocracy.net/get-involved/editorial-process.htm)" is trying to work towards Jarvis' ideal newsroom.