Over the past several years working for my local newspaper, I’ve witnessed an industry that carefully manages its news content and keeps it mostly close to home. It’s a kind of “closed loop” ideology that seems natural when the end product is a printed newspaper, with journalism and advertising bundled together in a physical package for delivery to readers.

But when journalism moves online, does a closed loop model continue to make sense? Is there more potential profit in limiting what I would call “content flow” – tightly managing where and how online content is delivered? Are heterogeneous bundles of all sorts of content the best way to reach or grow readership online? Perhaps not. More “open” web platforms could offer new opportunities for journalism looking forward, but we need to get beyond the closed loop assumptions built into the systems used today to bring journalism online.

The software used by newspapers to manage editorial content online – “content management systems” or “CMS” – implement an online model that largely follows the closed loop assumptions of newspapers in print.

With a CMS, the assumed needs of users of the system – journalists and editors – might be stated as: “Let me create MY content, store it in MY database and display it on MY website.” It is a focus inwards with the legacy goals of capturing readers, strengthening the brand and generating revenue from a known reader base through direct subscription and advertising. But if we were starting from scratch, imagining new ways to manage journalism online, the needs of journalists and editors might be re-worked along different lines: “Let me create MY content, mix it with content from all over the web and push it online such that it can be viewed or re-published to reach the largest interested audience.”

“Open” platforms for journalism would recognize and leverage the qualities of the web that make it so unique, instead of fighting against them. “Unbundling” news content and encouraging it to flow outwards is a fluid model that taps into the natural strength of the web to move information, and it could spur new thinking around revenue that cannot be imagined within the context of existing ideas about newspaper subscribers and “circulation.”

To be clear, I'm not making the "free content" argument here. My point is that we consider a shift in emphasis from closed systems that monetize through scarcity, to open platforms that get information to more potentially interested readers and outlets. Revenue generation is a central problem and "open" does not imply a stance against revenue.
Just the opposite, "open" implies more readers/outlets and therefore new ways to think about revenue.

The potential for these changes – for individual bits of journalism (stories, photos, video, audio) to travel fluidly and instantly – is a ready feature of the Internet, baked into its technical DNA. If you look closely, there are already controlled examples of content flow across the social web – Facebook users publishing YouTube videos to their profiles, Wordpress users publishing Flickr picture galleries, or SoundCloud users publishing audio to their blogs. But if applied to the news industry, unbundling could have a deep and significant impact on the practice of journalism itself.

How might journalistic content be re-combined and extended by new sites and services? What would the impact be on the thinking of journalists and the engagement of citizens in reporting the news? If the will to encourage content flow were codified in open platforms that made it simple and natural to report and publish news across the web, it would be hard to overestimate the impact on existing and emerging modes of journalism looking forward.

Chip Kaye is a software developer and the founder of Jseed.org, a free software project to develop an open publishing platform for micro-scale news outlets. He is the former Director of Web Development at the Daily Hampshire Gazette and lives with his wife and two daughters in Northampton, Massachusetts. He can be reached at chipk@jseed.org or follow @jseedproject on Twitter.