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

[Delirium]

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