Challenges for Open Media
Innovations in new media have made it easier for the general public to choose their own news stories. The Open Media Project is based on the ideal of decentralized media: given the open-source tools, individuals can produce media for their community that is valuable and will foster a truly democratic environment. As corporate news organizations all over the world continue to lose money and close businesses, it is interesting to see that they still cling to a centralized model that does not connect with the open-source way of the future. Media executives' increased enrollment in programs such as the Punch Sulzberger News Media Executive Leadership Program at Columbia, which employs "Las Vegas Rules" standard, is one such indicator that corporate media is not interested in playing with their open-source counterparts. David Folkenflik of NPR explains the Las Vegas rules: "That means what's said at the J School stays there — and participants say that gives them the ease of mind to share details about their own shops and offer heartfelt advice to others. I was allowed to observe with the understanding that I would get permission before revealing any specifics."
A true democratic system for public access media represents something more closely to what Kevin Kelly wrote about in his book Out of Control:
"Knowledge, truth, and information flow in networks and swarm systems. I have always been interested in the texture of scientific knowledge because it appears to be lumpy and uneven. Much of what we collectively know derives from a few small areas, yet between them lie vast deserts of ignorance. I can interpret that observation now as the effect of positive feedback and attractors. A little bit of knowledge illuminates much around it, and that new illumination feeds on itself, so one corner explodes. The reverse also holds true: ignorance breeds ignorance. Areas where nothing is known, everyone avoids, so nothing is discovered. The result is an uneven landscape of empty know-nothing interrupted by hills of self-organized knowledge."
See Also: http://scpr.org/news/2009/08/10/rush-reinvent-media-rivals-become-classm..., http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/index.php