Hi all,
In accordance with the discussion at http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/proposals#Wikinews_Hotline, the Wikinews Hotline has been shut down. The primary reasons were cost of maintenance, combined with lack of use.
I wanted to thank everyone who is subscribed to this list. The hotline was always an experiment, and a pretty rare experiment for a community news organization. While I'm disappointed that it never really worked, I am happy that we got to try this approach.
The door on something like the hotline is not closed. I continue to believe in the power of telephone-based reporting from the field. However, I would encourage anyone intending to try this again in the future to think about the usefulness of the hotline first. For the hotline to be successful, there need to be a lot of people who have this number programmed into their phones -- with the Wikinews Hotline this had never happened, even though it was on the Wikinews homepage for several years.
I will leave this list running, unless it becomes a haven for spam, in case someone wants to bring the hotline back.
-ilya haykinson