[Foundation-l] Murdoch newspaper websites to go paywall -opportunity for citizen journalism!

[Steven Walling]

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 at o2.pl> wrote:

> > 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?
>
> For NPOV. Hot news in mainstream media have very big POV. If you want good
> info you look for good media. Show me media with references. I see it maybe
> not only, but in Wikiews. So, we need more people, not only from Wikipedia.
> We need more partners - in pl wikinews we have ~ 20:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/25e7fm
>
> who allow us to copy under cc-by
>
> przykuta
>
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