Journalism lost its culture of sharing. Here’s how we rebuild it

Economic collapse. The most intuitive explanation is economic: that many organizations either lost technical staff or, in the worst cases, went entirely extinct.

“The biggest barrier is just that FiveThirtyEight is not there anymore,” said Dhrumil Mehta, a former staffer who now teaches at Columbia and Harvard.

Journalism’s contraction put pressure on even those who survived.

“When the rest of the news industry is being squeezed, it provides you with some job security to keep all your secrets,” Jan Diehm of The Pudding said. “If your skills are locked away, it can ensure there will be a place for you and your craft.”

Where the will to share still exists, the resources to do it are often gone.

“People are tightening up all across the economy,” said E.J. Fox, a freelance consultant who used to work at NBC News. “People are careful with their time and energy.”

But economics alone are insufficient to explain the shift. Many rich and well-resourced organizations have stepped back, while some small, cash-strapped operations have stepped up.

Technological maturity. Another explanation we heard was that many of the problems that incentivized innovation have been solved. Good software, often free, is available. There’s less need to build something new.

“The decline might actually be a sign of success,” said Aron Pilhofer, who led teams at The New York Times and The Guardian. “We don’t need 18 different frameworks. Svelte exists in the world. D3 exists in the world.”

Andrew Kuklewicz of PRX made a similar point.

“For almost every gem or library or npm module, there are five of them that do what I need,” he said.

The rise of commercial vendors offering polished solutions for common needs, from data visualization to content management, reduced the pressure to build and share custom tools.

“Datawrapper is really good,” said Pilhofer. “You have to ask, ‘Why would you not use Datawrapper?’”

And when tech giants like Google and Facebook entered the space with tools like Angular and React, news developers found it harder — and sometimes unnecessary — to compete.

Kuklewicz sees new opportunities emerging at the dawn of AI.

“It is another kind of Cambrian explosion,” he said. “AI has opened a whole new green field for people to go max out on.”

And even as new problems emerge, plenty of old problems still remain. Our ongoing struggles with building sustainable businesses and loyal audiences are bigger than any single organization, and would benefit from shared lessons and collaborative solutions, our interview subjects said.

An inward shift. The most successful news companies grew their technical teams and better integrated them into the organization, making it less necessary for staffers to find community among colleagues elsewhere.

“You pushed further and further into the center of the newsroom and became more inward-facing and less outward-facing,” said Paul Bradshaw, who teaches at Birmingham City University and runs the Online Journalism Blog.

The professionalization of these teams also changed their leadership, evaluation criteria, and incentives, making them more like Silicon Valley technology companies.

“Open-sourcing code doesn’t contribute to sprint goals or quarterly objectives,” said Tiff Fehr, who worked at The New York Times more than a decade before starting the consultancy Gasworks Data. “You’re driving agile processing cycles. You’re meeting your OKRs.”

One coder who asked to remain anonymous put it this way: “If leadership doesn’t care about it, and it doesn’t help you get promoted or get you more money or get you more respect in the newsroom, people just don’t do it.”

And for many industry veterans, personal circumstances changed as they’ve gotten older. They have families and less time to contribute. One developer with a young family told us that the grind of responding to GitHub issues and pull requests, even for projects he cares deeply about, has become hard to sustain.

Finally, once robust channels for sharing have declined or become walled gardens. Twitter all but disappeared as a space for news nerds to share work and ask questions. NICAR-L became less central as the community fragmented. Private Slack workspaces replaced open forums, creating smaller, more isolated circles of conversation.

How to fix it

The slippery slope of decline is not inevitable. At the NPA Summit and other industry conferences, participants presented what they’re building. The American Journalism Project’s OpenAI grantees have been posting their work to GitHub. The infrastructure for collaboration still exists. What’s missing is the culture and incentives to use it.

At the NPA Summit, we asked the room to help us think through solutions. We formed groups and collected ideas on sticky notes. Combined with ideas from our interviews, some patterns emerged.

What an individual can do

• Participate in other people’s projects. Filing issues, improving documentation and submitting pull requests to existing repositories helps build the ecosystem. It’s easier to join a conversation than to start one. “Nobody goes to an empty restaurant,” Derek Willis said.
• Share your AI experiments. Publishing your prompts, Custom GPTs, and other experiments can help others learn faster — even when they don’t involve code at all. Sahan Journal and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo both released Custom GPTs last year.
• Write “how I did this project” posts. The Pudding’s approach of developing work in the open and including methodology sections with every project offers a model that doesn’t require maintaining complex software libraries.
• Integrate open-source skills into your journalism classes. Dhrumil Mehta’s students at Columbia build portfolios through their GitHub contributions, creating work that future employers can see and evaluate.

What a newsroom can do

• Assign someone to coordinate. Several people suggested creating dedicated roles. The idea of an “open-source editor,” someone whose job is to help teams package and release their work, came up repeatedly at the NPA.
• Make it count. Making contributions count toward promotions and career advancement would align individual incentives with the collective benefit. “It would help if you literally made it part of people’s responsibilities,” Willis said. “We expect you to devote some amount of time to releasing.” That also includes how potential hires are evaluated. PRX asks about GitHub repositories and contributions during hiring, identifying people who are already excited about working in the open.

What the industry can do

• Recognize it with awards. Multiple people suggested awards and recognition programs for outstanding open-source work. As one developer told us, prizes and public recognition would help align contributions with career goals.
• Create space for collaboration. Add session time at conferences for hackathons and practical discussions about what we’ve learned and where we’re stuck. “We need a venue for problem sharing,” said Pilhofer. “Even if we didn’t fix any of them, just cataloging them” would help organizations see where collaboration might be valuable.
• Help nonprofit grantees release their code effectively. While many institutional funders have open-source requirements in grant agreements, resources are needed to make sure that code is easy to reuse, and widely adopted.