T
he Northwest Voice is a small newspaper in Bakersfield, CA. In 2004, management decided that the Voice should truly be a community newspaper, so they turned most of the writing duties over to the community at large. To quote from their About Us page, “The Northwest Voice is all about down-home news, told from your perspective. Most of the information and pictures in The Voice are submitted by readers, community organizations, churches and schools. We hope you'll participate! Our policy is to publish all contributions on our Web site and include as many as possible in the print edition. To learn how to contribute, click on the graphic at the top of this page.”A move like that takes a lot of brass. But, three years later, the Northwest Voice is still publishing (no doubt using Open Source software tools) and making a profit. They have backed off their original “all-community-written” stance and now also says. “In addition to reader contributions, The Northwest Voice features articles written by our editor and information about land development, home sale prices and other issues of interest to the community.” In other words (I think), the editor writes about his own interests, and a few things that are of general interest to mainly the local business community.
Still, this is an interesting, and perhaps noble, experiment. Although there have been a few less-all-inclusive moves to this sort of journalism, this is the first experiment to take the idea quite this far In the U.S. The Voice's publisher, Mary Lou Fulton said, "What's different about the Northwest Voice is that we're taking the explicit approach of asking people in the community to be the writers and photographers. The people say what's important to them rather than having a handful of journalists make those judgments on behalf of the community."
That’s about as Open Source as you can get.
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