Open Innovation in the News Industry

Cardiff.
The next speakers in this session at the Future of Journalism conference are Tanja Aitamurto and Seth Lewis. Their focus is on open innovation in the news industry: the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. Such innovation is necessary in news, due to the continuing increase in media platforms, the shortening of product lifecycles, the rapid change of consumer habits, and the diminishing resources available.

Tanja and Seth have identified three cases which exemplify such innovation. How does such innovation manifest in the news industry, and what implications does it have in research and development work? At the macro level, one such example is the Knight News Challenge. It is a high-profile competition examining the future of news, and can be seen to be setting the agenda for journalism innovation; overall, it has wide influence in journalism. Knight follows an inside-out process by providing funds, reports, and signals to the industry, as well as an outside-in process that taps into the wisdom of actors outside of journalism; this results in a coupled process which straddles the boundaries of journalism by linking journalists and technologists.

A second case, at the meso level, are open APIs offered by journalism organisations (such as the Guardian or the New York Times). Such APIs provide some degree of automated access to the content offered by these news organisations, as well as some basic tools for using it; this pushes content out, draws new experiments, ideas, and talent in, and thereby couples internal and external development and activity. What results is an innovation network that links beyond the boundaries of the organisations themselves, and value is created mainly through this coupled process.

Finally, a micro-level case is a site like Spot.us: a crowd-funded reporting tool. Users come to the site to donate money towards specific stories which have been pitched to the community; this has resulted in some 200 story projects already. The site uses an open research and development model: new ideas for the site are openly discussed by its users, and the underlying platform is made available as open source (and has now been applied beyond the U.S., too). Further, Spot.us also provides an open API for its content – and open innovation processes are therefore at work at each of these levels.

It’s not quite clear yet whether such changes have been transformational, but they have clearly been successful in a number of cases. The coupled process has been especially valuable, in fact, and has enabled news organisations and other participants to tap into new knowledge which had not been available to them previously.