Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Asparouhova

Finally, the news industry is a useful case study to demonstrate how different funding models might apply to different types of content creators. Like “open source,” “news” doesn’t refer to just one type of content. Also like open source, there are a few big newspapers (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others), which don’t fully capture the experience of the rest of the news industry, much like Linux doesn’t reflect the experience of most open source projects. With the continued unbundling of newspapers, we’ll likely see different models that work for different types of writers. As Damon Kiesow, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, puts it, “National and local journalism are not the same business. The New York Times can chase scale for profit, The Centre Daily Times can’t. Because what the New York Times has is an audience. In College Park, they have a community.”