ProPublica Post

ProPublica is a journalism website that prides itself on “journalism in the public interest”. ”Pro Publica” literally means “for the public” in Latin. This website has tons of news stories that can be republished by other news sources. 

To be able to be republished by other sources, ProPublica has a Creative Commons license. This license basically lets other people share someone else’s work, and also, the person who shares it, is legally allowed to build on it, meaning they are allowed to add information to it. ProPublica uses Creative Common licenses because they want to make people more aware of the issues going on around the world. The article states that they want their journalism to have an impact, they want it “to spur reform”. While maybe it doesn’t spur reform, people can still be aware of what is going on. With this license, news sources, like newspapers, can legally share these stories, but they cannot sell these stories under ProPublica's “NonCommercial” license. 

ProPublica benefits audiences by making their information available without legal hassle. Also, it could make the local news more interesting. In this article, I read that there are many news sources that use information from ProPublica, one source being The Trentonian, a newspaper right across the river. These stories are good content and they make people think. If the people think, then ProPublica may reach it’s goal of spurring reform. The articles on ProPublica are not articles we would see in mass media, and they reveal real problems, instead of the entertainment news people are so worried about today. 

ProPublica uses a Creative Commons license, which differs from tradition media. Traditional media uses copyright. Stories that are copyrighted cannot be shared, and if they are shared, the person who shares it must make it known that it is not their original content, or else they can be in major legal trouble. Also, I could not take a story posted by 6abc and build on it, like the Creative Commons license allows. 

I don’t think ProPublica will be the future of traditional journalism. While many people believe what they read on the Internet, some take the Internet with a grain of salt. Since ProPublica is a collection of news stories from different journalists, it may appear untrustworthy to someone who usually doesn’t look at these sites regularly. To me, their website doesn’t look professional, and it is unorganized, therefore, I wouldn’t travel to the site. If people are like me, I can’t see this being the future of journalism. Excluding the website set up, I still can’t see this being the future of journalism because people take pride in what they do, and many people want credit where credit is due. People probably won’t want to write a story, and have other people share it and possibly build on their hard work. I know I personally wouldn’t want that if I were a journalist.