Stuff that matters : slashdot and the emergence of open news

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new genre of user-driven Websites engaged in a novel form of news reporting which has been described as open publishing or open news, in analogy to the open source movement (see e.g. Meikle, Bruns). These sites combine news, rumours and background information as well as community discussion and commentary on their chosen topic, and frequently serve as a first point of entry for readers interested in learning more about the field; their key feature is that they are open to users contributing news stories and commentary, and that such contributions are usually posted on the site without or with only minimal editing by the site operators. Examples include the Indymedia network of sites (http://www.indymedia.org/), Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/), Kuro5hin (http://www.kuro5hin.org/), or Plastic (http://www.plastic.com/), but beyond this group of sites which operate mainly in the activism, Internet policy and technology sectors – many of them providing ‘news for nerds’, as Slashdot describes itself – open news sites can now also be found in many other fields of interest from politics to entertainment.