I think the endgame of personal publishing, in some ways, will be to democratize reporting. Of course, it can only go so far, and that’s not to say that “Weblogs will replace newspapers” or anything silly like that. In arguing this discussion point with folks several times, I keep noting that Weblogging is simply another medium, and that radio didn’t kill print, TV didn’t kill radio, and the Internet didn’t kill TV.

So, this has been endlessly discussed by tons of others … what the hell am I doing blathering about it on the Monday after Easter, 2005? Simple: I want to give an example of what I’m talking about. When I interviewed my friend Derek Webb a little over a month ago, I taped it; when we published the interview, we published the transcript and an MP3 of the audio. Curious as to our tones of voice when asking or answering a question? Give it a listen and decide for yourself.

I like to think of this as open-source journalism, the kind of stuff that really takes on Fox News’s slogan of “We Report, You Decide”. I’m sorry, FNC; no broadcast medium, limited by the hourly clock of the news cycle, gets to fully report on a topic so as to let the interested viewer decide. Editorial decisions have to be made in order to cut to length, and those decisions are always tainted with some bias. That’s life. Suck it up.

Why do I call this open-source journalism, bastardizing a term from my programming friends? Well, you know who’s doing the interview—me, Geof F. Morris. You know who’s being interviewd—Derek Webb. You can hear our words and read them as well; you can compare our voices to your experiences with us—if you’ve met either or both of us, you’re reasonably sure that we are who we say we are. If you’ve not, at least you know who we purport ourselves to be so that you can give us a try.

I think that openness with sources is really important [although anonymous sources are sometimes necessary, I think that's all a huge game and a big load of crap most of the time], and I think that the Web, with its nature as a two-way, push/pull transport medium, will work. TV and radio are broadcast media limited, to their detriment, by time constraints; print is limited by cost constraints. The Web still has time and cost constraints, but they’re largely oriented towards the receiver and not the producer. [See also: drinking from a firehose.]

So, yes, Chris Smith … this is what I’d said I’d write. For further reading, Jonas Luster’s Monopolies and Monologues briefly touches on the same topic and is, on his end, a part of a larger discussion on traditional media on his site.