I'm with Murdoch on this one. Have you seen what's happening to television at Hulu, and textbooks with the Kindle? Newspapers going behind a paywall is only too obvious. The current business model of "give it away but put up some display ads" is simply not sustainable. It only exists because a better business model has not yet presented itself. Textbook companies aren't going the way of many newspapers. They will only sell copies of their books that are tied to specific DRM models such as the Kindle provides, and they will artificially jack the prices up just as they have done with paper textbooks. The newspaper companies that haven't failed are likely to follow suit. Probably we are just seeing the beginning of the micropayment concept. I kind of prefer it as I really, really hate looking at advertisements. Hulu is nice enough to tell me how many seconds the advertisement lasts. I surf the web with mute on for exactly that long.. Kind of a mishmash of ideas but they seem quite related. We are definitely going through a shift from free to paid content online. Wikipedia is ever more important.. On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com

My Problem with Wikinews is, that writing news is very time consuming and old news ist rather worthless. So the balance is bad. That is different to e.g. Wikipedia. A more collaborate way of writing news could reduce the cost of writing news, but after publishing it is loosing its worth still. What is old news for? Sage Ross schrieb:

Sage, I really liked your post about Wikinews. I really think that part of the thing holding back Wikinews is not just that they don't have a robust community yet (correct me if I'm wrong), but that they don't have what traditional news sources have: a well-oiled machine to broadcast their content across various mediums and draw in readers. At this point in time, the project should act just like any other news organization, and never assume that readers are going to flock to them. The clear advantage we hold as a body of volunteers and as a formal organization is that we have a strong understanding of web publishing, especially in comparision to dead tree news sources. The fact that we're not using that innate understanding to our advantage in transmitting Wikinews stories outside the site itself is a shame in my mind. Another is resources. I've spent hundreds of my own dollars on resources for Wikipedia (mostly books). I can imagine that quality original reporting for Wikinews would cost some amount of dough every time, not just when I wanted to gather special resources. What about microloans or grants for accredited Wikinews reporters, either from the Foundation or ala Spot.us? Steven On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Przykuta <przykuta(a)o2.pl> 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. Wikinews, by contrast, is at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to online news reporting. There are hundreds of major news sites that offer content at no charge (although not "free" in the sense we usually mean), with the huge benefit of full time, paid reporting staff. If the best news sources online go behind a paywall (which is inevitable, I think, as a WSJ subscriber...), Wikinews might draw enough participants to reach the wiki "critical mass." I'm not sure what else will do it - some series of high profile scoops or major interviews, perhaps? Nathan

Sage Ross wrote: 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

Magnus Manske wrote: Wikinews being "free" (as in CC-BY) or "for free" doesn't matter, if the content is useless. I need Wikipedia so I can check background information on that new politician, on the author of that new book, or to find out what H1N1 really stands for. Already when Wikipedia contained just a few thousand stub articles, it was very useful. But when is Wikinews going to become useful? Ever? If it were twice as useful now as it was last year, then we'd only have to wait a few more years. But is this happening? Its Alexa rank is 13,400, far behind Wikipedia (7), Wiktionary (1049), Wikibooks (2370), Wikiquote (3330), and Wikisource (4600). A rank of 13K would be impressive in a smaller language, but not in English. Who uses Wikinews and why? Elections for the European Parliament are coming up on June 4-7. The election campaign is now big news around Europe. This is a topic where Wikinews could be useful, if it had the ambition to cover the parties, the politicians, the speeches, the promises. I went to en.wikinews.org and searched for European parliament. I found nothing about the election, only some old articles about events in the parliament, and these articles weren't even categorized as European Parliament, because there is no such category. How can this be a useful source of news reports? On Wikipedia, the [[European Parliament election, 2009]] article is already 51 kilobytes and has 16 interwiki links. That is useful. ---- Wikinews was created as a spill-over from Wikipedia, since "Wikipedia is not..." a news reporting site. This is not a good start for a project. The idea was that news reports should be free (as Wikipedia is free). The problem is that newspaper websites are already openly available, free-of-charge if still under strict copyright, so what extra value does Wikinews bring? The right to reuse the contents? But who really needs to reuse yesterday's news reports? Isn't that what the encyclopedia is for? Wikipedia calls itself an encyclopedia, which is an all-round (as in "cycle") learning (as in paedia) resource, but Wikipedia never was as all-round as required of traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia is fine anyway, because it "makes the web not suck". Most people don't go to Wikipedia to find information, they go to Google. For some topics, Google will present a link to a Wikipedia article. Each new article makes the web, as found on Google, suck a little less. So, Wikinews should free itself from its role of being a spill-over from Wikipedia, and instead aim to make news reporting on the web not suck. But in what way, exactly, does news reporting suck on the web? This is a very current discussion, especially in the U.S., where newspapers are closing down or cutting journalists' salaries and Rupert Murdoch last week said the days of free newspaper websites are soon over. Wall Street Journal's website hides behind a paid subscription, and other newspapers should follow, rather than offering news reports for free on open websites with ads. Such a change would make news reporting on the web suck, for sure. But we don't know yet if it will happen. We can't rely on how newspapers will suck in the future, but have to build on the way they suck today. One way that newspapers suck on the web, in my personal opinion, is the front pages of their websites. They all look the same, trying to present some top headlines and links to departments for sports, business or literature. I seldom read more than the 3-4 top headlines. If I click down into the literature department, only 1 or 2 stories are new, the others are from last week. This is a very different experience from reading a printed newspaper with all its subsections, where everything is new from yesterday. This is where Wikinews sucks even worse. Its front page is far more boring than any commercial newspaper's website. There are so many kinds of news that it fails to cover (such as the European Parliament election), that a daily visit to en.wikinews.org would be a complete waste of time. Instead, I can go to news.google.com to search for news on a particular topic. This is very useful, if I already know what I'm looking for. But it's not very good for learning about breaking news. Another way that traditional news reporting sucks is that they often just present press releases and there is too little investigative journalism. But having an investigative reporter work for months on a project is really expensive, either for her employer or for herself. Shifting that work load to mass collaboration is exactly what Wikileaks does. That website actually makes news reporting suck less. Should Wikinews have a mission more like theirs? A lot more thinking is needed here. How does news reporting suck and how can Wikinews provide something better? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Sorry if this point may have been brought up before, but a difference between Wikipedia and Wikinews is also the text sort. Journalistic texts have a broader range of stiles, neutrality is handled differently, opinion is less taboo than in an encyclopedia. This makes journalistic texts more individualistic - and less collaborative. And journalism is digging out original knowledge, this requires a person who is responsable and can be made responsable. Ziko 2009/5/11 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>: -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde

Fred Bauder wrote: I like the idea of having Amtrak subsidize the transportation costs of citizen journalists trying to get to their news sites. I don't think it's a matter of "if" the newspaper crisis gets worse, but "when". One of the big factors to turn people away from paper newspapers is the excess of advertising. Most of the flyers that come with a newspaper go straight into the <s>trash</s> recycling. Good ads, if there be such a thing, just get lost in the pile of crap. As is the case with the auto manufacturers, labor costs are not the most important factor in the collapse of newspapers; putting out a product that nobody wants is. Paying for online news won't work either. A person who wants to look at an issue in detail will want to compare different news sources, and won't want to pay for them all. In many cases the best report may be in a publication that one would not otherwise need to ever look at. You're right to say that Google and Yahoo are in a much better position to be aggregators. That work can be done by clerks who just organize what they find elsewhere without any need to analyze what it's about. The Wikinewsies who perform an aggregating role are not citizen journalists; they're armchair journalists. Failing newspapers means fewer journalists to go to where the news happens. It increases the likelihood that we will depend more on homogenized syndicated news reports. A military that embeds such journalists, for example, has a better control over the message being reported. Getting a rounded analysis of an issue depends on there being more eyes to directly watch what is happening. With many eyes on the job the predictable POV of any one pair becomes marginalized. Ec