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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l