Wikipedia Founder: How To Save The Newspaper Industry
Editor's Note: This article has been updated
SAN FRANCISCO -- Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, had a few words to offer ailing newspaper and media companies looking to cut costs and compete better online. The online maverick pointed to the Wikipedia business model.
During the opening keynote remarks Tuesday at the ad:tech 2009 San Francisco, Wales told attendees that newspapers and traditional media companies cannot compete alone in online media.
"They should just give up," he said, but did suggest a few cost-cutting measures. This starts with examining the topic that reporters cover and deciding how to tap into other sources for information, similar to Wikipedia's model.
For instance, the very best political bloggers are easily equals to the best New York Times columnists, Wales said. They do it for free because they love it. "Fabulous opinion editorialists" don't need the infrastructure of a publishing company or newspaper to succeed.
Wikipedia, founded in 1996, has 25 employees, but it relies on thousands of people worldwide to support the community. Today, the site is the fourth-largest Internet company. There are 2.8 million articles published in English, and it offers content in 22 other languages that add content for free.
Wales said media companies need to tap this model, yet keep their competitive advantage, which is the ability to send reporters to locations such as Afghanistan and Iraq. "I think newspapers should try and invite the community in and take over sports journalism. Avid sport fans write tons of content and there are people who would pay money to have the job of a Sports Illustrated reporter.
News is widely syndicated -- and that's one reason why it's difficult to charge for the content, Wales said. Smaller newspapers pick up news from The Associated Press, for example, but that type of syndicated online model makes sense. "If you went into Google News and didn't see 600 copies of the same story, but just one, that one could make money -- and spreading it everywhere doesn't make sense," Wales said.
Many newspapers are transitioning from print to online and incorporate online video, but not many are taking advantage of user-generated content. The industry is in its infancy.
"When I look at consumer-generated video like YouTube, it feels a lot like text did in 1999," Wales said. "It's a lot of individuals posting things they made themselves. Some is great, some really awful. We haven't seen communities come together to produce bigger projects."
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So, we're continuing with this lie of "Wikipedia Founder"? What is with the online PR hack press, with the inability to simply and properly call him "co-founder"? You gals must not read the real news: http://www.sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001424.html
Wikipedia was founded in 1996?
What exactly are you smoking, Laurie?
And just where, pray tell, are bloggers to get the real news that is the basis for their opinionated rantings?
The article makes sense. It also explains why we're up for some serious problems if the "Wikipedia Founder" is right. Journalists are trained to dig up information, not just observe it, and articulate it with as much credibility and clarity as possible. Bloggers and others, while they most certainly do have a place in the information universe, can not possibly replace them.
Angela, I was born in Lima and long-ago worked for your newspaper. Re-read the story and you'll find your answer. News would be funded by the savings in not paying opinion columnists. Not saying it would work, but why pay the opinion writers if others are willing to do it for free? Take the money saved on syndicated and local opinion columnists and plow it back into news gathering. Apologies to Mike Lackey, if he's still there.
This must be a publicity stunt. Otherwise, this "founder" (or as MediaPost calls them, flounders) has earned his gold card in AH's regardless of his old IT skills.
Yes, great idea. Then all of our news can be just as error-riddled as Wikipedia's information.
Isn't it funny how it's always the owner of the company who defines "success" as working for nothing.
I'm surprised that the Newspaper community has not looked at local Out Of Home as another digital avenue for their content. The amount of time spent outside the home and not in front of a PC would make relevant local news delivered to digital signage networks a value to the network operators and venues.
Gee, what a great idea -- turn every idiot gossip in the world into an unpaid "journalist," so a giant multi-media corporation can get rich off their unpaid labour. Who really cares about the quality of the content, right? If you set up enough monkeys with typewriters, eventually one of them will give you Shakespeare.
I especially like the part where you suggest people would actually PAY to report for Sports Illustrated. For how long? And how long would it be before this person started accepting bribes to keep certain things out of the news, or put certain things in the news, etc.?
A lot of people would also willingly pay the government to give them a seat on the Supreme Court, too. Why don't we do that?
Maybe there are newspapers out there that spend gobs of money on opinion columnists, but I suspect there aren't many. We could cancel every single syndicated columnist on our opinion page, and the savings might buy us two or three hours of a reporter's time per week. And with the columnists we pay for, we have a guarantee that they'll turn in a set number of columns at a set length -- with no editing required -- per week. Work that's done for free tends to be a lot less reliable.
Not to say that the quality of journalism in the US has really been stellar in the last few years - but the scary thing here is to consider the idea that we will lose the professional journalist to this kind of thinking. Eh - who needs multiple sources any more.
Yeah, great ideas all, Jimbo. Make them like Wikipedia. And turn the whole thing over to bloggers ... and fans. Yeah, that'll do it. Why didn't anyone else think of that?
They'll all work for free, too. Ergo, no union. Cool. Maybe they'll even pay to do it. Like so much a word. Could be a problem with the labor laws, but why not give it a shot? One thing's for sure, these folks all have a great track record of dealing with, like, you know, the facts.
Sounds more like certain death, to me. And by the way, what newspapers do really well Mr. Wales is cover local news, not what's happening in Afghanistan.
I expect the news media execs will be tripping over themselves for more of your neat solutions to save their industry.