Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, on newsgathering

by Margot | October 8, 2009 | Blogosphere, business models, first amendment, lamp | 1 Comment

I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, yesterday. I took the opportunity to ask him about Wikipedia’s relationship to legacy journalism, and his thoughts about the decrease in newsgathering, and what systems might take its place.

Because of its system of cross-references to “reliable” outside sources, Wikipedia depends on the continuation of newsgathering journalism or its equivalent.

Wales affirmed that Wikipedia has no intention of replacing newsgathering. He posits, however, a reimagination of the role of newspapers, splitting what he sees as the current “hybrid system of journalism” into parts. Some of these parts may be better (or at least more cheaply) handled by non-legacy media. Wales believes that opeds, for example, could be dropped out of newspapers and left to the blogs, since the papers (according to him) serve only a distributive function. Wales also cites sports journalism as something that could be taken over by citizen writers, due to the publicly accessible nature of the events, and the high nonmonetary incentives for writer-fans. (It’s of course debatable whether the editorial  and accreditation functions of newspapers could be adequately replicated in the blogosphere…)

However, Wales emphasizes the need for certain kinds of traditional journalism to continue: the day-to-day gruntwork of political reporting, for example. The question is not just one of motivation or resources– Wales also sees a need for objectivity, rather than cause-motivated reporting.

This reflects a general consensus that even at the basis of the newest of new media, there’s still a real need for objective newsgathering– whether by newspapers or by reliable freelancers in all sorts of media forms. These are the resources that form the basis for informed political discussion– resources that a democracy can’t afford to lose.

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