Here is Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian 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". 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" is trying to work towards Jarvis' ideal newsroom.
