[WikiEN-l] BBC blog on WSJ study

[Ian Woollard]

On 27/11/2009, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>> Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably
>> that you can't copyright information.  You can copyright expression, but
>> Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news
>> reports.
>
> I wonder how true that is, though. I'm sure people on Wikinews do
> sometimes cut 'n' paste, but I feel there's more to it than that.
>
> It actually takes quite a bit of work to read an entire article and
> process it in your mind then put out a purely self-made version. And,
> let's take the *most* optimistic view of editors: you're still
> reporting a report. Some guy went out there, said what he saw, got
> money for it, funded by advertising.

Not always, no. Perhaps not even usually. The money often comes from
subscriptions, classical example is the BBC. If anything,
subscriptions are more reliable; there's less commercial pressure to
bend the truth on things. And a lot of the organisations that use
advertising pay companies like Reuters for their news, there's only
very indirect funding by advertising.

And a lot of Rupert Murdoch's money comes from subscriptions also- he
charges for satellite and cable access.

> At best, all we can do is say "this guy saw what he saw and now I'm
> repeating it".

A lot of the time, that's all they're saying too; stories frequently
aren't by reporters from their organisations.

> Don't misunderstand me... I'm still on Wikipedia/Wikinews's side on
> this. But that's as a reader and editor, not as someone running a
> business.
>
> Surely it must be true to say that Wikinews would be nothing without
> paid journalists from whom we aggregate content?

Not absolutely definitely. The Wikipedia doesn't have (m)any paid
staff, in the unbelievably unlikely situation that the other news
organisations completely disappeared, there's a reasonable chance that
Wikinews could fill the gap. We also have other sites like Slashdot
and Digg and so forth; these also find and disseminate news. They're
not normally as reliable, but they're not *that* bad. In most news
organisations, news finds them, not the other way around; and then
they have a process that pretty much anyone could do, it's not to do
with how they get paid.

-- 
-Ian Woollard