I was one of the creators of Facebook's Instant Articles. At that time, I had concerns about the future of publishing; namely, that publishers were struggling to survive whereas networks -- like Facebook -- had too much control over what was being seen and shared.

With Instant Articles in the works and things like Apple News, AMP, and Snapchat Discover on the horizon, journalists needed new tools to do their job effectively.

The recent rash of fake news and propaganda -- and the half-hearted efforts to stem its spread -- are evidence that these tools still don't exist. And as someone who has seen behind the curtain, it's pretty clear that these tools are a ways off.

A year or two ago, I began working on a simple specification that attempted to provide an "open web" approach to decentralized publishing. It defined a structure for representing content and journalistic metadata. More importantly, it did so in a way that would be amenable to open collaboration by technologists and journalists, alike.

It wasn't and isn't "the" answer. It's more of a jumping off point.

What's missing, in my opinion, is community: engineers and journalists coming together to build open, free tools that aren't married to Facebook or Google or Twitter. Tools that are designed for journalists and not advertisers or marketers.

To that end, I wanted to invite the community here to take a look at what I've scraped together. Perhaps it can, at the least, form the basis of a discussion about the future of publishing on the open web.

If you'd like to be added as a contributor, feel free to let me know.

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Link: http://openpublishing.github.io/

TL;DR -- publishing has radically changed and fake news is a symptom that journalism hasn't caught up. We should try to fix it. Here's a rough start.