Tom Johnson's Library tagged journalism →  View Popular

The leader of this effort, like most non-journalists, seems to make the mistake of believing that journalism is writing.

No, journalism is based on reporting. And reporting is hard, time consuming, and expensive.

There was a small bit of reporting in this effort, and that's commendable. But that seems to be where more emphasis should be placed in the next trials.

I'm a little worried about a possibly misplaced buzzword: "generative."

First, here's what wikipedia says: "Generative Systems refers to systems that use a few basic rules to yield extremely varied and unpredictable patterns." There's more there, but a critical part of the definition is that complexity falls out of "basic" or "simple" rules. That's supposed to be the power--or at least the poetry--of generative systems or grammars or whathaveyou.

"Generative" is a buzzword because it's great pals with another buzzword: "scalability." If a system is generative, the thinking goes, it's also probably scalable. Not just scalable, really, but radically scalable. In OffTheBus's case, it seems to me, the idea would be that into the system go simple pieces of writing and reportage from volunteers and out of the system emerge nuanced, sophisticated works of journalism. Within the system, meanwhile, the inputs interact and commingle according to a set of more or less naive rules, dynamics that don't themselves require much more sophistication what's involved in the inputs themselves.

Now, OffTheBus may have accepted these inputs and produced these outputs, but it doesn't look much like a generative system to me. Actually, it sounds like it took heroic effort and enviable intelligence on the part of editors like Amanda Michel. For that, they deserve serious praise--they did a big job with few resources. They were efficient, perhaps very efficient. But generative systems don't need brilliant editors pouring in hours and hours of administration or organization. Layers of hierarchy are not appropriate.

Also, I doubt that the metaphor of a pointillist painting can be an argument that OffTheBus was a generative system. Pointillism doesn't refer to a system of dots; they're not interacting with one another. Pointillism refers to something closer to a collection of dots, residing next to one another inertly, such that the magic happens in the eye of the beholder. The viewer of a painting does the work to bring the image alive, as it were. Likewise with OffTheBus, the reader of ground-level coverage does the synthesis in order to reach an overall intelligent idea of the landscape.

So I have great hope that distributed reporting can be done sufficiently efficiently that it works. But as with wikipedia, I have no illusions that there won't be a core of highly sophisticated actors encouraging, organizing, filtering, and editing.