Mailing List Archive: Re: Murdoch newspaper websites to go paywall -opportunity for citizen journalism!

Nathan wrote:
> The biggest problem for Wikinews in my mind is that delivering news is a
> competitive and innovative business. In the on-line and comprehensive
> encyclopedia vacuum, Wikipedia was able to be "get there first, with the
> most" and draw eyeballs and participants by being the leader.

This certainly distinguishes Wikipedia from all the sister projects.
Wikipedia started with a vision; the sister projects started by not
being Wikipedia. Each, beginning with Meta, was set up to get around a
limitation imposed by a Wikpedia rule. It's very difficult to build
vision when your entire raison d'Ãªtre depends on *not* being something.

Ec

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Sage Ross wrote:
> You're right about Wikinews as an all-purpose news source: the
> commercial sites were there first and do it better.
>
> But as a hub of citizen journalism, Wikinews does still have a chance
> to be the first important site. At this point, the world of citizen
> journalism is extremely diffuse.

One problem, I think, is that Wikinews has substantial competition in
the realm of citizen journalism, too. Indymedia, for example, beat us to
it by a number of years, albeit with a fairly narrow (and heavily
slanted) political focus. From a wider perspective, a large number of
bloggers see themselves as engaged in citizen journalism, especially
those who write on politics and current events. Some of these news-ish
bloggers have gotten enough funding that they have paid full-time staff,
and do things reminiscent of traditional media, like attending press
conferences and commissioning polls, and serving as hubs for many
individuals' efforts (e.g. DailyKos).

These do have a distinguishing feature of largely hubs based on a shared
ideology, whether political partisanship or commitment to some
particular cause (e.g. environmentalism). Wikinews does have the
distinguishing feature of aiming to be an NPOV news hub. But that makes
Wikinews's job actually harder, since it's easier to rally people around
a cause than to rally them around the avowed lack of a cause. ;-)

-Mark

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