>>A good return on investment as it builds your reputation – not all editors may understand that important lesson though.<<

Editors will not often want to publish a story that someone else (that's the old school way of working). What I was trying to say was that there are other ways of your work making an impact, and different outcomes for it.

I think your point about open source journalism is very interesting and appropriate.

I wasn't talking about exclusives, merely reporting a converstion with Tony about a colleague I know who lost a story as a result of open sourcing. They did all the digging and the FOI to uncover it and then someone else used it. They didn't even get the credit.

And as for the community being involved in improving info and developing stories – dead right. That is exactly what should be happening.

And as for the term hack – yup I love it. I'm a hack learning to hack.

I wonder if you can draw parallels with what happens in open source software. That is, what was once expensive to develop or buy can now be downloaded and adapted for free – and freely. The outcome is that companies have to move “up the value chain” – like companies offering more tailored services (like Red Hat) or hosted, hassle-free services (WordPress.com). In both cases, the underlying software is also available as a free by-product for those with time.

So on the “tailored” side maybe it's less about the scoop as a journalist/news org and more about what you can offer that's distinctive. The same story about, say, a link between cannabis use and emotional levels on a map is always going to play out differently in The Independent as compared to the Daily Mail, etc.

I don't know what the news equivalent of “hassle-free hosted services” is, maybe it's an easier version of Yahoo Pipes where you don't need to know regex! Maybe it's a whole load of those small apps that relate the data to the visitor, like the annual budget calculator or the BNP hot spot map.

Online news tends to get rid of exclusives anyway, even if the pay wall were to work the competition can rush out a copy of your story! Maybe you assume that's the case and work with them along lines where you don't compete.

Open source tends to raise the game for everyone…

It allows a wide variety of people to patch up bugs. Maybe it's akin to the experts to which Tony refers helping with your fact checking – as well as bloggers and other “amateurs” who can contribute to your overall story.

Open source isn't a perfect analogy because I'm not sure that data can be copyrighted, therefore you cannot have licences like GPL.

Just a few thoughts, I may have got some of journalism terminology wrong. You probably hate being called a “hack”, but maybe the term will be ever more apt…