👋 Hi Reader,

On this fine Saturday morning, let me come clean on something you might not know about me:

I am an open source nerd.

I started my career building game design levels on Half-Life, (I know, I am old, be nice) and I was blown away by the fact that someone would allow a nerd like me to play around and add my tiny contribution to the game I so loved playing.

I never pursued that line of my career full-time, but I got hooked to reading and knowing about all things open. As I built my career later in product and design, I got enamored by open Kaggle datasets and the opportunities it offered for me to play around with real-world data.

The curiosity for open source and open data also led me down into several rabbit holes, which I believe has aged well in 2026.

Open Money: Bitcoin, Ethereum

Open companies: Cal, Buffer​

Open Publishing: WordPress

And more recently, Open Media and Open Journalism.

Is Open Journalism A Thing?

I have been following Scott Klein’s work in the newsroom space for a while now. Scott has been working at the intersection of tech and journalism for years (Muckrock, ProPublica) and he is also a fine podcast co-host at ‘The Data Journalism’ podcast.

So when he announced he is building openjournalism.news on LinkedIn this week, I was intrigued.

You see, not a lot of people (myself included) expect newsrooms sharing and documenting their process around tech, data, and AI in the open.

To Scott’s admission, he mentioned that although he knew a lot of newsrooms shared their work as open source, the numbers have been declining in recent years, so he built this newsletter and site to encourage more contributors to this space.

I believe this is a much needed shot in the arm to build trust and credibility.

Public interest on traditional media is at an all-time low.

Anything newsrooms could do in this space to open up their process will help them rebuild this waning trust in their audience.

And sharing and documenting their process in public? They would encourage readers to go deeper than the surface-level phenomenon these newsrooms shed light on, inviting them to explore the possibilities in open civic spaces together.

It looks like Scott is just starting out, but I would not be surprised given his stature in the newsroom space, he will be able to gather enough attention to make this a nationwide initiative across local and regional news media.

I also hope it leads to citizen journalism getting a much-needed breakthrough in data reporting. I will be watching this space closely.

Are you building something similar which you would like to open up for other contributors in this space? I would love to talk to you.

Let me know by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to marketing@letterstack.co.

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Cheers,

Renga from LetterStack

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