NewsCloud Mission Statement
From Newscloud
Prior to the Internet, money was the primary barrier to entry to publishing; today, it’s appropriate and accessible technology. NewsCloud is an evolving open-source social media platform that enables publishers of all kinds—from emerging journalists to community groups, nonprofits and media startups.
Most social news ventures have been limited to blogging, bookmark sharing and discussions at individual Web sites. Today, if someone starts a blog, they often begin without an audience and without advanced community-building features offered by large sites such as Digg. Alternately, choosing to publish on a proprietary platform locks them in and limits their audience.
At NewsCloud, citizen journalism is free of the constraints of for-profit, proprietary technologies and closed communities. Our approach is to link readers, bloggers, reporters and editors through open, collaborative technologies. We provide features that can enhance the sites or blogs of individual NewsCloud contributors. NewsCloud itself, meanwhile, serves as a hub for those many individual voices.
Furthermore, as an open source project, NewsCloud is essentially a community-owned broadcasting platform whose future can be shaped by anyone interested in contributing to its development. And because it’s in the public domain, it can’t be taken away.
While most citizen journalism sites are built as monolithic Web sites to unseat their mainstream media brethren, NewsCloud is pursuing a network strategy i.e. a federation of blogs, community Web sites and hosted media startups linked loosely through NewsCloud.com.
Because mainstream media profits only once it reaches enough readers to surpass the costs of reporting, editing and publishing, the evolution of the print newspaper industry favored a monolithic approach i.e. drawing readers to a print newspaper and later, a single online Web site. Furthermore, the search for profits often pressures publishers to compromise the proportionality, accuracy or independence of their content.
While the Web’s architecture is more suited towards a distributed strategy, most citizen journalism sites so far have tried to replicate their mainstream competitors with their own monolithic Web site destinations. In most cases, they simply outsource editorial to their users and repurpose mainstream content without having to bear the original costs. In fairness, NewsCloud has also done this to some extent.
The result is a handful of isolated, homogenous, proprietary Web sites whose weaknesses in part stem from the lack of diversity in their communities.
NewsCloud’s strategy is to build features and technologies that more naturally pair the challenges of quality journalism and community with the distributed advantages of the Web and its users.
Rather than build a single destination site, NewsCloud provides tools and services that help new media participants find an audience, simultaneously strengthening both the NewsCloud hub but also the spokes of the global media wheel e.g. individual blogs and related community sites. Our goal is to build features and services that provide real value to readers and journalists who participate regardless of their size, budget or role. With this strategy, NewsCloud will build a federation of content and community greater than just one site.
