There’s a quiet shift happening in the media industry — and it might just be one of the most important strategic inflection points we’ve seen in years.

You can see it in the growing number of open-source projects emerging across news. One of the latest is Scott Klein’s Open Journalism project, which aims to surface and share tools, data, and infrastructure being built across the industry. The fact that we now need a dedicated resource to track these developments tells its own story: This is no longer isolated experimentation — it’s a movement.

Schibsted’s decision to open-source its text-to-video tooling is another powerful signal — not just a product release but a statement about how the industry might need to build going forward.

Because right now, we’re still duplicating effort at scale.

Across the industry, publishers are investing heavily in AI — building similar pipelines, testing similar tools, solving similar problems. From transcription and summarisation engines to newsroom alerting systems, we’re seeing parallel innovation … but very little shared infrastructure.

Florent Daudens captured it perfectly on LinkedIn after reviewing INMA Global Media Awards finalists: multiple organisations — Hearst, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — have effectively built versions of the same tool. Powerful, yes. But also a missed opportunity.

This is exactly the layer that should be open. The tech industry figured this out decades ago.

Linux showed us that massive, mission-critical systems can be built collaboratively, with strong governance and distributed contribution. Kubernetes (an open-source platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and managing containerised applications) demonstrated how open-source can become the foundation for entire ecosystems. React (an open-source, front-end JavaScript library used for building dynamic, interactive user interfaces) proved that opening core technology can accelerate adoption and talent alignment at global scale.

These weren’t just engineering decisions. They were strategic ones.

Each used openness differently:

• Linux reduced cost.

• Kubernetes set standards.

• React drove adoption.

And in every case, the value shifted away from the core code towards the ecosystem built around it. That’s the big lesson media should think about now.

Open source is not about giving things away. It’s about deciding where you don’t compete.

Publishers should be asking: What is truly differentiated? And what is simply table stakes? As Florent Daudens put it: “Compete on journalism, not on tooling.”

The commodity layer — transcription, summarisation, content transformation pipelines, internal tooling — is where collaboration makes sense. It’s where shared investment can unlock speed.

And yes, speed is the constraint.

If we want to move at the pace of technology companies, we cannot keep rebuilding the same foundations independently. We need shared infrastructure, shared standards, and shared governance. And that’s the harder part.

The success of open-source projects isn’t just about code — it’s about how they are governed. Clear ownership, contribution models, and decision rights are what enable scale.

This is where media must focus next.

What would an industry-wide governance model look like? Which pipelines should we prioritise? And who is willing to lead?

Because this moment won’t wait.

The shift is already happening — not just in tools but in expectations. The rise of open standards, from model interfaces to content licensing frameworks, is reshaping how technology ecosystems evolve.

The question now is whether media chooses to participate — or continues to build alone.

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Banner photo: Adobe Stock By NooPaew.

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