TomMR made me take a day off to the Guardian Open day http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2012/mar/24/the-guardian-open-weekend-live-blog . For non-UK readers the Guardian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian orginally the Manchester Guardian ) is 180 years old and one of the few non-profit, major daily newspapers. The Guardian put on show many of it’s regular features and beyond – and for us one of the highlights were the crosswords sessions run by “Paul” and “Araucaria”. I’ll devote a blog for that – you’ll see why.
But the session which most excited me was the Guardian Open Digital Platform. I’d come across this before as both Timetrics and the OKF have worked with the Guardian , especially on data and data-journalism. The Guardian team is absolutely committed to Openness. They see their content as something to be re-used – for example I could reformat the Guardian and produce my own newspaper. They work with Facebook, creating a new entry to a different generation of young people, many of whom never read newspapers. No wonder that the G has the second highest online presence in the UK (the much larger and much … Daily mail is first).
They work with Open source and Open content. They see a vision beyond the traditional newspaper. They don’t know what it looks like or even what role they have in shaping it – leader? Infrastructure? Early adopter? But they want to be the first there.
Literally abutting onto to them is a major scientific publisher, Macmillan/NaturePublishingGroup. What a contrast!