A simple, open format for taking back publishing | Hacker News Reader

A simple, open format for taking back publishing

4 pointst3mp3st4 comments

I was one of the creators of Facebook's Instant Articles. At that time, I had concerns about the future of publishing; namely, that publishers were struggling to survive whereas networks -- like Facebook -- had too much control over what was being seen and shared.

With Instant Articles in the works and things like Apple News, AMP, and Snapchat Discover on the horizon, journalists needed new tools to do their job effectively.

The recent rash of fake news and propaganda -- and the half-hearted efforts to stem its spread -- are evidence that these tools still don't exist. And as someone who has seen behind the curtain, it's pretty clear that these tools are a ways off.

A year or two ago, I began working on a simple specification that attempted to provide an "open web" approach to decentralized publishing. It defined a structure for representing content and journalistic metadata. More importantly, it did so in a way that would be amenable to open collaboration by technologists and journalists, alike.

It wasn't and isn't "the" answer. It's more of a jumping off point.

What's missing, in my opinion, is community: engineers and journalists coming together to build open, free tools that aren't married to Facebook or Google or Twitter. Tools that are designed for journalists and not advertisers or marketers.

To that end, I wanted to invite the community here to take a look at what I've scraped together. Perhaps it can, at the least, form the basis of a discussion about the future of publishing on the open web.

If you'd like to be added as a contributor, feel free to let me know.

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Link: http://openpublishing.github.io/

TL;DR -- publishing has radically changed and fake news is a symptom that journalism hasn't caught up. We should try to fix it. Here's a rough start.

While it is useful and necessary to have a spec the audience is the author who doesn't need to know or understand all the bracket and curly business. All she needs is a list of benefits and a text editor claimed to produce OpenPub format. Even the upload mechanism can be omitted.

The fake news narrative is kind of reactionary. The flaws in journalism are much more basic. As investigations cost money the level of investigation needs to be documented along with the publication. If I was to coin something like this I would make mandatory fields for Human Sources, Institutions and publications. That way the reader has at least some context.

I would also hammer out an ongoing review system that takes us beyond "author" and "publisher" with the ability to dynamically correct it self if new facts require it.

Sorry for being very negative, since I'm generally happy about every initiative that looks into these things, but:

The format looks needlessly complicated and not very "open web" to me, compared to e.g. HTML with maybe some extra info, e.g. microformats2 syntax (could even reuse existing vocabulary from there). Works in browsers, feed readers, website-previews in other software, ..., and software that understands the extras can upgrade the presentation with them). It's not clear to me what downside of existing formats this solves that couldn't integrate with what exists already.

Also, while some standard for decentralized publishing would be useful, I don't think it's what journalism needs to fight fake news/propaganda, those happen on totally different levels, so bringing that in seems odd. Decentralized publishing won't be suddenly enabled by a new file format.

I really like the idea and the initiative. But isn't plain (semantic) HTML already an "open Web" approach to decentralisation? Why can't we stick with this rather than create another format?

I also wish that publicly-funded broadcasters (like the BBC) would take some initiative here and support or release open-source tools for publishing. Presumably they have custom-workflows, proprietary code bases, or layers of organisational cruft and inertia that stop them from doing this.

The BBC does have an excellent Journalism skills website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/skills

And this was posted to Hacker News last year:

Superdesk: an open source end-to-end platform for news

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615153

Totally second the effort. But agree with open source UX on this. Plain old HTML is the first approximation to an answer. Open publishing needs an incentive mechanism and is therefore not a technical but a business problem. Also CUNY J school with Google and a bunch of folks did election land. If there was a way to replicate that effort in a open decentralized way, that is the way to go

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